Gemini
by Simpson17866
Summary: A team of time travelers led by a disgraced former Time Agent discover a military mad science laboratory built around torturing captives – including artificially grown Time Lords – with genetic modifications intended to create super-soldiers. Rated T.5
1. Chapter 1: Kyra & June

**Disclaimer: I am not posting this story on StoriesOwnedBySimpson dot net, I am posting this story on Fanfiction dot net :)**

 **My Original Characters play a larger role in this fiction than do any Canon Characters, but that does not make this an original fiction, and I claim neither profit nor credit for any part of the beautiful, wonderful world that this story takes place in. Allons-y**

* * *

 _In the first days, Kyra prayed to be freed from the Hell that she had been trapped in._

 _Every soldier that came near her poisoned her mind by showing her some new fantasy of cruelty. Some prided themselves on how some weakness on her part must be responsible for the way that she had been hurt. Some wanted to see how close she could be dragged towards another mind-reader before the two gave each other seizures from the "feedback loops." Some wanted to murder other prisoners in front of her and to make her tell them what the victim was thinking: whether those who were bleeding would think differently than would those who were choking; whether those who had been taken from outside would think differently than would those who had been bred here; whether those of a reptilian race would think differently than would those of a mammalian race; what it was like for her when the person's soul was finally ripped out._

 _Some taunted her with plans to torture her in ways that even their own comrades would not accept as "research"; wanted her to know that nobody would believe her – or care even if they did – so long as their attacks against her existed solely in what they made her feel in their minds, with nothing tangible for the cameras to "protect" her from._

 _In the following weeks, she – Karen? Kayla? Kelly? Had she truly forgotten her own name? – prayed to understand why this had been allowed to happen._

 _The prisoners that the soldiers were most interested in making her read were the ones they called "Time Lords." This species did not exist in the natural world even to these peoples' knowledge, and every Time Lord in the compound with her had been cloned from DNA samples that even the scientists in this century did not completely understand. In theory, the Time Lords would be able to survive life-threatening injuries once the scientists figured out how to replicate the DNA perfectly, but so far none of the test subjects had been able to._

 _What they did get to work in the Time Lords included psychic ability. Where passive psychics like herself could not turn off the flood of information from the minds around her, these were actives who could not get anything without making a physical connection with a specific person. They couldn't even be read by passives like her under normal circumstances. Their minds were too alien for her to understand anything, which she found strange because she could still read people that looked more alien than the Time Lords did. The prisoners weren't allowed much interaction to begin with, but the Time Lords in particular were killed too frequently for her to get to know any of them very well._

 _In the following months, Subject K-438 prayed for the strength to endure._

 _They had stopped sending real people, human or otherwise, and were now using robots to force her from room to room. Perhaps she should've been thankful to not have to listen to the monsters anymore; however, as she was also allowed less and less time to interact with the other prisoners, she started to miss her previous connection – however horrifying – to her captors in contrast to this new isolation. She felt like she had known a word for such a condition when she had lived in her own world._

 _In the following years, she found herself praying less and less._

* * *

Finally, the door to June's holding cell opened. The man who entered, a human named LeValle according to his tape, appeared to be a Primary Lieutenant from the early-23rd Century Air Force, 4212th Castorian Valkyries if she was interpreting the uniform correctly. June tried to remember whether any war crimes were associated with this division. She couldn't think of anything.

LeValle wasn't heavy on the eyes: nice crew cut, bad-boy swagger, strong eyes, solid chin and jawline. Under better circumstances, June wouldn't have had a problem with him finding her handcuffed to a table. She noticed that Primary Lieutenant LeValle was wearing decorations for valor but none for injury in the line of duty. Perhaps he was more skilled at "office politics" than at direct confrontation?

June decided to take that chance and start on the offensive. "You'd better be interrogating me last, because if my crew have been isolated for as long as –"

LeValle didn't let her finish. "I'll be asking the questions here, Ma'am. You were caught trespassing on a maximum security Air Force base that –"

That was the best opening he could come up with? June was already disappointed. "And that's what happens when a secret base is kept secret very well: people don't know about it! You can't arrest people for trespassing when you've hidden the 'Keep Out' signs!"

LeValle seemed surprised that she yelled so loud instead of letting him finish, but he regained his composure quickly enough. "Ma'am, in case I wasn't clear, I'll be asking the questions. Please state your name for the record?"

He did not seem good at this; June just glared at him for a few seconds before saying anything else. "Captain June Harper."

LeValle didn't show any reaction to that name. Not only did he clearly not know of June herself – the poor bloke would've run screaming if he had – but if the Time Agency's system of "Captain J H" codenames in general didn't even register, then he clearly hadn't heard of them either. That was not reassuring. As ridiculous as the Time Agency's bureaucracy had been in June's experience, the people in this facility messing around with time vortices without the Agency's oversight sounded even worse.

June continued, "Born 5050 by the Earth calendar, graduated valedictorian in 5073 from the Scranton Time Academy on Delta Vega. Since 5077, I've been travelling too much for universal years to work as benchmarks, but it's been about 10 of my personal years since –"

LeValle cocked his eyebrow in disbelief. "Ma'am, you are aware that the present Earth year 2235?"

Unbelievable. "Yes, and are you aware that your apparently-not-supposed-to-be-a-secret Air Force base is built right under a cluster of temporal rifts?"

"Yes."

Had he really given away classified information just like that? Even June's natural charms shouldn't have been able to open him up that quickly. "Then why are you so baffled by the idea of a time ship from your future refueling from a time rift in your present?" June sighed, trying to sound as dramatic as possible. "If your comrades were at all competent, then they would've already scanned our ship, and they would've found that Arachne has a temporal signature that should not be possible with 23rd century human technology. Where else could we have come from?"

LeValle started to breathe more heavily. He didn't seem very experienced at keeping himself collected, let alone at keeping June from controlling the conversation. Had he never interrogated anyone before? "Ma'am, if you're not going to start taking this seriously –"

"You'll what? Kidnap my crew even more? If _you_ people were taking this seriously, then you would've let us leave the planet before we could learn about you people in the first place!" June got an idea. "Wait a minute, isn't there a General LeValle in charge here? Yeah, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I did hear somebody say to 'tell General LeValle' about the 'intruders' right before the tranquilisers kicked in."

"Listen, I don't know what you're getting at –"

"I'm getting at how there's somebody in the base with your name, but who's old enough to have got to General. I'm thinking that your rank is either a reward for putting out for the General –"

LeValle's eyelids all but flew off of his gorgeous face. "Excuse me!?"

"– making this a kind of Cougar Cub patronage, or that the General is one of your parents, making it familial Momma's Boy patronage."

LeValle's eyelids relaxed; clearly the same name was a sign of parentage and not of marriage. Then again, June saw no reason not to take this a bit further: "Or any combination thereof."

LeValle pounded the table, probably not completely voluntarily. "Shut up, bitch! You are not in charge here, and I do not appreciate –"

"And I'm sure that an actual soldier, that had actually given blood, sweat, toil, and tears in actual battle, did not appreciate being passed up for some punk that has never seen actual combat!"

"Shut. Up."

Seriously? What was this, bloody amateur hour? "Or were you valiantly hiding while the cowards were too busy fighting?"

"You listen to me –"

"News flash, _bitch_ : you don't get hurt, it don't count."

LeValle was starting to sound even less collected. "What the Hell makes you think I haven't seen my share of action? I –"

"Would be wearing any decorations for injury if you had been given any?"

LeValle started to stand up, but June kicked him in the leg and he dropped back into the chair. That felt too easy. From just reading about military history, the soldiers of past centuries like this one had seemed like superhuman badasses; and yet to meet them in real life, they were always so fragile.

"See that? Injury. And your men have been through worse than that."

LeValle seemed too scared to say anything else.

"Do you really think that you have the respect of the soldiers under you who have actually fought to live as long as they have done? Do you really think that any of them think that you deserve to live above them?"

June didn't expect LeValle's face to pale so quickly.

"Are you saying my men want me dead?"

June felt herself start smiling. "If you can't survive the real world as well as they have had to, then I'm afraid I don't see why not."

The door opened again. This time it was a Colonel Leeson, also human. Thinner face than LeValle, very pretty cheekbones, and the way she held herself was a lot more professional than LeValle's showy-macho performance had been. Her uniform was plainer than LeValle's; June didn't recognise the design, but different uniforms clearly meant that a handful of different military units were sharing a single base. Despite the simplicity of Leeson's uniform, she struck June as a very "warrior-princess of Hell" kind of elegant; or maybe that was just June's admittedly overactive imagination.

She hadn't got the burn scar down her cheek and neck removed, even though June was sure that such treatments were available to soldiers in Leeson's position. Perhaps this was a survivor's guilt complex, an intimidation ploy, a court-martial punishment; in any case, Leeson certainly wouldn't scare as easily as LeValle had. Hopefully, she would have the real-world experience to listen to reason instead.

"Primary Lieutenant LeValle, you are relieved to the barracks."

He certainly looked relieved; he couldn't limp out of the room fast enough.

June decided to try starting out more friendly with this one. "Well, hello Colonel. You're a lot prettier than the last one I had in here. I didn't think such a thing were possible." She changed her mind and stopped smiling. "Where the Hell's my crew, Leeson?"

"Captain Harper, you have to understand –"

"I have to understand where my people are and when we can leave."

"Well, that's going to be a problem, Captain, because we only have two people in our custody besides you. We can't make any deals until we know what the rest of your crew knows about the –"

"Those are the rest of my –" June felt the table hit her in the gut.

"Don't interrupt me, Captain. Are you ready to cooperate now?"

June shook her head "no."

"Was that a 'yes'? Good, thank you. Now, we've never seen anything exactly like your ship before, so we're willing to consider that the piloting and sick bay could be automated at least, but the size of the ship still makes it look like it would need a crew of five or ten people to fly and maintain, not just three. All we have is you, Captain, two guys calling themselves Nathan Durst and Damien Mitchell, and that's it. Do you really expect me to believe that those three people make an entire space-faring crew?"

June felt herself start to spit. "Four."

"Excuse me?"

"Four. Myself, ship's Captain; Nathan, ship's mechanic; Damien, First Officer; and Arachne – or as I like to call her, 'Ari' – our ship, navigator, pilot, sick bay, medic, weapon's officer…"

"Are you saying your ship has an AI?"

"I'm saying that she _is_ an AI. There's a difference."

"And do you always take such distinctions so personally?"

June couldn't believe that that was a serious question. "Yes, because she's a member of my crew, not a sodding piece of equipment!"

"I hope you forgive me for my lack of imagination, Captain, but I was under the impression that it's mathematically impossible for mechanical computers – of any processing speed – to be as sentient as a biological organism."

"What about a biological computer?" June put on a look of exaggerated shock. "Really, would a mindless machine be able to enjoy any kind of art for it's own sake? Let alone decide that the works she enjoys the most tend to be, say…"

June wasn't sure which of Ari's tastes would get her point across the best: Silurian fashion and vehicular designs; Human film and literature; Gelth lightshows and dance; …

Then she realised that Leeson probably hadn't even heard of most of those cultures. She decided to go with Ari's favourite Human works instead: "… science fiction stories from 21st Century Earth? Arachne, on the other hand, not only decided a while back that a character from her favourite film series had a lovelier voice than she herself had originally been stuck with, but she even reprogrammed her own synthesisers to sound like the character instead. Do you think a mindless tool would ever do that?"

Leeson very pointedly looked at her antique wristwatch. "Are you almost done yet?" For somebody sent in as an interrogator, she didn't seem interested in using her ears to learn anything about the people being interrogated.

June imagined ripping them off of Leeson's pretty face. Possibly with fingers, possibly with teeth. "I'm sorry, maybe I'm just feeling extra touchy right now, seeing as you kidnapped my crew under the guise of arresting us for a crime that, by definition, we could not possibly have known not to do. And instead of just giving us truth serum, finding out that we hadn't known anything, then Retconning us and sending us on our –"

Leeson's eyes bugged wider than June was sure a Slitheen would've thought possible. "What exactly do you mean by 'Retconning,' Captain?"

"I mean drugging us with Retcon to make us forget the last few hours. All we would need to do first is record messages of ourselves saying not to come back. Then, when we woke up and Arachne showed us our recorded messages, we would trust our judgments and leave."

"Even with the rest of your crew missing?" Leeson's voice had none of the earlier bravado. At least she seemed to be holding out better than LeValle had done.

"If you would give us truth serum, then you'd know that there is no 'rest of' the crew."

"And if we can't do that?"

June pinched the bridge of her nose. "Look, even if you think that there are more of us, you could still Retcon us and leave us some to spy on when we woke up. If Damien, Nathan and I aren't the only people in the crew and we woke up not knowing where we were, then we'd first look for the others – since we wouldn't remember that anybody else was also looking for them – and then you would know their names from us calling for them. Or is that too reasonable for the likes of you?"

After some quiet deliberation, or at least a very good performance thereof, Leeson stood up. "Well, we do not normally take interrogation tips from suspects, but I personally felt that your suggestion sounded reasonable enough. I'll go to talk to my superiors."

June wanted to laugh at this woman's priorities. Finding out that people could travel backwards in time hadn't rocked Leeson's world, but finding out that other people knew about Retcon had shaken her from the offensive to the defensive? It was bad enough she was taking June's Bond-villain scenario seriously.

"And if they decide that it isn't worth a try, do you think that they're more likely to discipline you for taking a prisoner's suggestions and giving her control of the interrogation? Or do you think that they'll congratulate you for falsely gaining my trust, what with letting me think that I took control and got you on my side against the evil desk bosses?"

June tilted her head down and to the left to get a better look. "I mean, personally, if I was your boss and I got to look at that arse all day, I've got to say that disciplining it would be the more tempting –" She took another table-hit to the gut. Alpha-Bitch Leeson was back.

"Don't push your luck, Harper. I'll be back in a few minutes." Leeson turned to the door.

"Why bother? I don't know if the mikes are on you, the table, or in the walls, but either way your superiors already heard everything we've both been saying, right?"

Leeson stood still.

"Are you admitting that you and Cryboy didn't actually have any questions worth asking, in which case my crew should've been released hours ago? Or did you just forget the questions you were supposed to be asking, and you didn't want to hurt your control image by having to be reminded in front of the prisoner?" June couldn't stop herself from laughing.

Leeson stared at the door – or possibly just away from her – for a few seconds of very loud breathing, probably either scowling and/or foaming at the mouth, before sitting back down to face June again.

"Fine, let's start over. You want us to believe that you're a time traveller from… when did you say, 51st century?"

"What tipped you off, the time ship, the pheromones, or just me saying so?"

Leeson's jaw dropped. "Pheromones? Did you really just say 'pheromones'?"

June tried, and felt she succeeded at, smiling again. "OK, so if that wasn't it, then I appreciate you thinking that I just naturally smell like this. Was it instead the time ship from the 51st century, or the fact that I specifically said that I was from the 51st century, that tipped you off that I'm from the 51st century?"

Leeson seemed to need a second to get the pheromone conversation out of her head. "Captain, we understand that you claim you're from the future. We just don't understand how you expect us to believe you, seeing as time travel to arbitrary destinations in the past is impossible. Only wormholes that go between specific times and places can be used."

"Yeah. Maybe in the present." June made a "did that just blow your mind?" gesture that she believed came from the 22nd century, maybe 20th or 21st. It was rather difficult to do without breaking the handcuffs, but she felt that she managed well enough. "Seriously, haven't you scanned Arachne yet? Does the kind of radiation on her match anything that's found in this universe besides the temporal rifts above us?"

"I'm afraid I haven't had the chance to be told anything about your ship since I came in here… what do you think that was, five minutes ago? If the boys in engineering have learned anything new since then, how could it possibly have been passed on to me?"

"Maybe through the ear-piece that you should be wearing in case somebody outside needs to give you pointers about new questions that should be brought up?"

Leeson looked like she was getting tired of June knowing so much about interrogation procedure. "We don't actually use those here. We found that it undermined the questioner's 'control image,' as you put it, to have them interrupted by ear-pieces that carry the associations of unwanted distraction. Just having somebody else walk in with a folder to go over is more effective at reinforcing the proper chain of command."

June felt a part of her brain die hearing that answer. A captor explaining her tactics of manipulation to the intended target of said manipulation would've undermined the captor worse than any equipment could do. Was this some kind of mind game on Leeson's part: a single interrogator alternating between the good cop, the bad cop, and the beautiful-but-incompetent cop to keep the prisoner off-balance?

June realised that if that was Leeson's intention, then it was working: she was indeed starting to feel exhausted by the amount of stupid she'd been exposed to in the last half hour. Had LeValle been a brilliant actor playing a bloody idiot the whole time?

June made a mental note to try that technique sometime, but this still meant that it would be even harder than she'd thought to deal with her captors directly. "Well then it's too bad that you ruled out truth serum just now. You want to know where we're from and how much we know about the base, I want you to know that that we didn't know anything. Sounds like that would have been a win for the both of us."

Leeson shook her head. "Captain, if we used truth serum every single time that some –"

"Oh, really?" They'd had truth serum this whole time; they just hadn't felt like using it.

Leeson scowled put her palms to the edge of the table.

Very well then, if they were saving it for extreme circumstances, June would give them extreme circumstances. She grinned and licked her lips for dramatic effect, looked Leeson straight in the eye, and pulled the handcuffs apart.

Lesson jumped back. She put her hand to the baton on her waist, but a flicker of realisation danced across the delicious look of fear on her face. Clearly, she had just figured out that if June was strong enough to break the restraints, then June was also too strong for the baton to protect her. Leeson's previous appearances of passivity had almost certainly been mind games, but June was sure that this new fear was genuine.

A drumbeat of footsteps outside the room drew closer to the door. Reinforcements were on their way, and the interrogation was clearly over.

June didn't care that whatever shackles they put her in next would be stronger. This was a waste of time, and hopefully a show of force would work where reason hadn't. "Are you going to give us the truth drugs, or not?

* * *

 **AN: I'd like to thank the beta readers who've worked with me so far on making this story presentable, and I'd like to thank any community readers who've made it to this AN :) Please review! I hope to update 1 chapter per weekend.  
**


	2. Chapter 2: Damien

Damien started to wake up. Or rather, he started to sober up: he realised his grogginess felt more like truth serum than it felt like actual sleep. Now that he was paying more attention, he figured it was probably something like trimethyl-salumate or fluorolynormic acid, judging by the pins and needles feeling in his tongue. His first conscious thought – after passively recognizing the after-effects of the chemicals – was he couldn't wait to find out what the Captain did this time: maybe an already-betrothed Silurian princess, or another Judoon commander?

His second thought was the serum was probably gone from his system if his first thought had been so less-than-literal.

So far, the last thing Damien remembered was the Captain enforcing shore leave while Arachne refueled at a temporal rift they found at a Level 3 planet Arachne _claimed_ had no sentient populations. He forced himself not to make any escape plans until he could remember something more relevant. Him and the others being captured was starting to come back to his mind, as was him being interrogated for an extremely long time. The people who took him seemed to think he and his mates had deliberately trespassed on a military base they didn't actually know about. At least, they didn't know about until they'd been taken in. He smirked as he imagined what the Captain might've said – hopefully without violence this time – about this arrangement when she'd been interrogated.

Presumably, the truth serum – maybe it was the Captain's idea, certainly he wasn't the only one to have got it – had been to verify he hadn't actually known anything about the base. He wondered if the Captain had brought up Retcon yet, since that didn't seem to be the base's first choice for dealing with potential intruders. His head and neck didn't feel very sore, so even though he was in a relatively standard interrogation room right now – with all of the furniture designed to be functional instead of comfortable – he had probably been moved somewhat recently from whatever medical bed had been used when he was being drugged. Which probably meant he was not actually getting Retconned anytime soon, now that he thought about it, or else they would've already done it and he would've already skipped this part. Now he was wondering about what could possibly have come up during a truth serum interrogation that a military would still feel the need to follow up with another sober interrogation. What was this, 21st century? 22nd?

"Damien Mitchell, are you awake enough to talk yet?"

So the people here weren't wasting any time getting back to the questioning. Damien wondered if he should answer politely, sarcastically, or not at all for a while. Then he figured with the amount of time he imagined he had been on the drugs, he had probably already used enough direct honesty with these people for one day. "No."

Damien felt his forehead slam into the table. Totally worth it.

He rubbed his forehead to calm the bruising while the person walked around the table to face him. He noticed his new interrogator – her tape said her name was Leeson – had a wicked, bluish burn running down the side of her face looked like exposure to a temporalised acid. Damien started to get even more worried about what these people were doing. Did they not know what they were dealing with when they built a compound under a cluster of temporal rifts? Did they not know even basic chemical safety precautions? Seriously, what year was this?

"Let me try that again. Damien Mitchell, do you know where you are?"

"Yes, I think so. Your people tell me we're in a secret Air Force base, which personally strikes me as rather counter-productive – I mean where I'm from, 'secret' means you let people ignore it if they didn't know about it – but whatever works, I guess."

"I would appreciate it if you would save your snide remarks for when –"

"And I would appreciate saving my polite remarks for when I'm being drugged. That is what just happened, right? Truth drugs?"

Leeson raised her eyebrow. "Yes, how could you tell?"

"Partially, it's because I've learned to identify over half a dozen forms of truth serum through repeated exposure – travelling with Captain Harper will do that for you, you should see my collection of arrest warrants and various uncivilised equivalents – and a numbness in the tongue is an after-effect of quite a few of the safest, most reliable compounds. Mostly, it's just my Captain's standard procedure – after any potential mating opportunities are exhausted, by which, now that I think about –"

Leeson's fists started to look even tenser.

"Sorry, am I rambling? Anyway, the Captain's standard procedure is to recommend we be given truth-serum-cum-Retcon if we accidentally end up somewhere we weren't supposed to know about. I'm still a little fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure that's what I remember being interrogated about the most. So why am I still here?"

"Because I am trying very hard to make a deal with you."

Damien pretended he was considering what she said and dramatically gestured tapping his head with his finger. Not his index finger. "Sorry, Ma'am, but I'll need to talk to the Captain before I can make any promises."

"Well, she and Nathan were still in and out of it from the Flynor last I was told, so that conversation is going to need to wait at least a few more minutes no matter what we talk about here. Besides, you mentioned that your role in the crew is mostly that of the 'tactical advisor': you come up with a bunch of options really quickly so that Captain Harper can choose the best final decision to enforce."

"Well, I'm also half-way decent with firearms, even though the Captain's the most –"

Leeson shook her head and rolled her eyes. "Focus. When she does come to and hears our offer, wouldn't she want you to have already had some data to work with? That way, you're not as caught off-guard as she is, and you can jump right in with your own contributions to the discussion."

"Well then, I guess you're not as dumb as you look. Shoot."

"We'd like to offer you people jobs as scientific consultants."

Damien blinked a couple of times. "Excuse me?"

"Since the scientists we already have are hopelessly ignorant of temporal physics, chemistry, you name it, compared to any of you – you know, only being from the _present_ – we were wondering how much any of you would be willing to educate us so that we don't kill ourselves trying to figure these things out."

"Or get acid burns?"

Leeson raised her hand a couple of inches, as though she were about to touch the scar on her cheek before she stopped herself. "Let me guess, you can tell the difference between different chemicals' burn scars?"

"Not specifically, but temporal acids in general tend to leave burns that are more spider-webby than normal acids' more bubbly ones."

"And would you tell me the difference between temporal and regular acids?"

Oh, what Damien would've given for the chance to see June's or Nathan's reaction to the physics lecture slash ramble he felt forming in his brain. "Besides the fact some particles can move in a bunch of small and medium-sized dimensions instead of just the 4 big ones? Not much. The main difference is the hydrogen ions released by most acids stick around and can keep messing around with biological structures by starting more reactions that otherwise wouldn't have happened; whereas once a temporalised particle breaks off of a regular one, it doesn't normally connect with another normal one quickly enough to stick to our plane for more than a few milliseconds. Once it disappears, the original chemicals can get back together the way they were supposed to be more easily than they could if the foreign particles were still there, such as the ions from the regular acids. The initial damage is worse for temporal acids, but then it stops more quickly: what you see is what you get. I'm sorry, I don't know what century this is: do you need me to explain the different kinds of dimensions?"

Leeson took a few seconds before responding. "Early 23rd. The big ones go back and forth across the whole universe and are dominated by gravitational effects; the small ones go clock-wise and counter-clockwise for a few Plank sizes and are dominated by quantum forces; and I'm guessing the medium ones are subject to both?"

"Bingo, nice. I'm not sure which chemicals you use the most, but time machines where we're from use materials active in 12 dimensions – the four big ones, two of the medium ones, and six of the small ones – so we tend to think of the universe in terms of those 12 unless something extremely unusual happens."

Leeson took more than a few seconds this time. "So, do you see why we want to keep you around for a while?"

Damien held back a laugh. "Of course I do. Do we have a choice?"

"Well, yes: either you work here or you get Retconned, and since I'm guessing that you wouldn't consider the second option to be a bad one, then I'm going to say no, we're not threatening you."

"Sorry, Leeson, but I'd really like to know how soon I can expect the Captain to be functional again."

"Is there any circumstance in which you would make a different decision than she would?"

"Have you ever had to catch somebody who's been air-locked and then pull them back into a ship from the vacuum of space?"

Leeson mouthed "What" but didn't say anything out loud.

"Did you misunderstand the question?"

Leeson took a breath before answering. "No, I'm just wondering what that has to do with what _I_ asked _you_."

"Easy: about a month ago in our personal timeline, we're thinking that it would be cool to see the First Silurian Pilgrimage for ourselves, have you heard of them?"

Leeson was starting to sound aggressive again. Good. "Yes, reptilians from Earth that escaped the Cretaceous extinction. They evacuated as many as possible to colonize new planets, while those left behind built underground bunkers that gradually expanded into thriving cities. What do they –"

Damien put on his best impatient voice. "Shush, I'm getting there –" He almost bit his tongue off when Leeson smacked his hand with a baton.

"If you must know, _First Officer Mitchell_ , I don't enjoy being interrupted, and I would sure as Hell love to know if you're getting to an actual point anytime soon."

Damien kept massaging his hand while he answered. "OK, fine, we get to the Silurian Ark on its voyage from Cretaceous Earth, and almost all of the crew are in cryo-sleep save for a scant few security officers keeping the wildlife under control. Arachne's resting so that she doesn't need to worry about overheating; Nathan and I are checking out the dinosaurs and the ship's hydroelectric generators; the Captain is trying to shag any of the crew that are awake – and probably most of the ones that are still asleep; Hell, maybe even some of the dinosaurs for all I know –"

Leeson's jaw dropped. "Wait, you mean she doesn't just act that bad to make people uncomfortable, she's actually like that all the time?"

"Can I hit you with something for interrupting me? Is it my turn for that?"

Leeson looked even less amused than before. Very impressive.

"Anyway, alarms start going off all over the place, and we find out another ship is on a collision course. We head back to Arachne in case the people on this new ship need help, but when we separate from the Silurian Ark, a duplicate of Arachne appears from the future – 'cause, you know, time ship, she can go to a time and place even though she's also somewhere else already – and our future selves tell us the ship just crashed into the Ark is owned by a pirate. They tell us this man will try to kill every single Silurian on the ship by individually waking them up, forcing them into the airlocks, then jettisoning them into the vacuum, and the timeline would get messed up if he 1) sees us catch any of them before they die, B) gets stopped while there are still Silurians on board, or 3) dies before the auto-pilot can take the ship back to Earth.

Damien noticed Leeson's face turn pale. He didn't blame her. In any case, if she was invested enough to react like that, Damien gambles she might listen to the rest without hitting him again. Should buy him a bit more time at least. "They give us the coordinates for where and when the ship will be when it's safest for the Silurians to get back on board, then they disappear to whatever we do after our rescue mission is resolved. We wait for the pirate to throw the first group out, let them suffer for a few seconds, then Arachne tractor-beams them into her airlock so the pirate thinks they died. We take them to the ship's future point we gave us, go back to a few minutes after we left so we can pick up the next group that gets thrown out, and repeat the process for what to us takes days, even though the landings in the ship's future point are only spread over a few hours."

Lesson whistled, which Damien found very disturbing. "You people single-handedly averted a genocide? No preparation, no backup, next to no warning? That is impressive."

"We got lucky."

"Lucky my ass; you have the technology to decide whether entire species survive. Are you allowed to tell us when those kinds of time tricks will be standard operating procedure for us?" Leeson wasn't sounding as aggressive or impatient as she had been.

Damien wondered how long he could keep this tangent going. "No, and I've not got to what happened on Earth yet."

"And is that part more important than the fact that time travellers are omniscient and can succeed at anything just by telling themselves how to do it perfectly?"

"Actually, we can't. Time loops having to be stable, where 'A causes B to happen, which causes C to happen, which causes A to happen,' means the universe tends to be skewed in favour of the loop not happening in the first place. 'C won't happen because A didn't happen' is a lot more likely than 'A happens because C will happen;' you just don't hear about the googolplexes of time loops that didn't happen as much as you hear about the dozens that did."

Damien didn't feel like telling her about the species in the universe that wasn't bound by time loop stability. He didn't want her to spend her life – however much remained – in fear of a Dalek attack that either A) wouldn't happen to her at all, or 2) would kill her regardless of however much preparation could be managed at her century's level of technology.

"So you have absolutely no control over your time travel technology whatsoever?"

"Not when it really matters, no. On a semi-related note, I imagine a job interviewer would want to know what kind of person they are offering a job to before making a final decision, right?"

Leeson did the Eyebrow Thing again. "Yes?"

"So why are you deciding ahead of time whether what we did on Earth is 'more important' than what we did on the Ark?"

Leeson grabbed a fist-full of her hair, somehow not pulling it out of her scalp. "Do you ever hold onto one thought long enough to make it through a rational conversation?"

"Sorry, too smart for that." Damien managed to keep from grinning. "The unit I was stationed in – before I met Captain Harper – said it was a psychological defect, and at the time I agreed with them, but the Captain says it saves her life a lot."

"And the rest of your story really is more important than what you already told me?"

"I think the whole thing is better than either-or." Plus, Damien wasn't sure how long it would take the Captain to wake up if she hadn't yet. Although, it occurred to him that it would probably have been easier if he hadn't changed the subject away from the technology discussion Leeson had already been most interested in.

Leeson shook her head. "This had better be good."

Apparently Damien hadn't pushed too far. "Anyway, so after we're finished evacuating the crew into the safer future point, we ask the crew to show us the ship's flight records so we can see when the ship was at Earth. As you can probably guess, we are extremely curious as to what happened that was so important we weren't allowed to stop the pirate beforehand, and we hope we can capture him after seeing what happens at Earth, take him to be tried by the Silurians, and keep the Captain from torturing him to death in the process. Seriously, I don't know how angry and violent she got with you over the false espionage accusation, but I don't think I can repeat enough this guy was a genocidal psychopath, and I made no guesses about his life expectancy at the time.

"So we get to when the ship shows up at Earth, and we find out the auto-pilot is damaged and not controlling the retro-thrusters correctly. We manage to crack the Earth military's encryption –"

"You can do that?"

Damien realised that telling her that might put the rest of the base on too-high alert and that Arachne might not be able to hack them if she needed to. He also thought that should've occurred to him first; maybe the truth serum didn't wear off as much as he thought? "Seriously, this might've been mid-24th century, so only about a hundred, hundred and fifty years ahead of you, but the problem with how brilliant the cryptographic developments will get in the next few decades is how much longer the cryptanalytic programs will remain relevant. Sure, Arachne was all of 2600 years ahead of the Earth we went to and her analytic programs were still similar enough to their cryptographic programs to work, but you're only about another 100 years behind them and I imagine Arachne would be as incompatible with your computers as the Turing ENIGMA-crackers would be against a carrier pigeon." Telling that lie made Damien comfortable he was sober after all.

Leeson seemed to calm down too. Hopefully, that meant she was buying it instead of just counter-bluffing better than he was bluffing.

Once again, Damien wished he'd agreed to the micro-expressions classes the Captain had been so keen on having him take. "Anyway, the Indian Space Agency are planning on launching nuclear missiles – to be covered up as being used against a 'mere' asteroid – to destroy the Ark before it can collide with Earth and trigger worldwide tsunamis. While the missiles are being prepared, a task force are being sent up to try to re-start the manual controls so the missiles would be unnecessary. We can't get any information on the specific agents sent to the ship, but the rockets start up again before the Ark can crash, and we see the pirate's ship detach and lead the missiles away."

Leeson started tapping the table.

Damien decided he should probably finish up soon. "Almost finished, I swear this time. We want to know whether the pirate is on board his ship when the missiles impact, so Arachne hacks into the ship's communications so that we can listen to what's happening from the microphones on board. We hear two people, presumably the UN agents, calling each other 'Nefertiti' and 'the Doctor' – not codenames I would've wanted, but oh well – the pirate begging both of them for his life, and 'the Doctor' taunting him about how shiny, precious, and expensive the missiles must be after reminding him the Silurians begged for their lives. They teleport out, leaving the pirate in the ship when it explodes, and then – satisfied with how the pirate is dealt with – we go back to when he first hijacks the Ark so we can give our past selves the evacuation instructions, then go to when the crew have got back to the Ark so we can tell them the pirate was killed by Earth forces."

Damien dramatically inhaled, hoping Leeson would get his self-deprecation about how long he had been talking. "So what do you think?"

Leeson didn't answer for what felt like almost a minute. "I think that that was a very fascinating story, and I think that you and the rest of your crew must be very proud of yourselves, but I'm not looking for fascinating stories right now, I'm looking for relevant, useful information that would help us decide whether you should work here or not."

"You didn't think that was relevant?"

"No, 'relevant' was you telling me that you prevented genocide. Even though you apparently have no control over when you can do tricks like that one specifically, but that was also relevant information. I don't see how 'not doing anything but watching Earth forces finish the job' is relevant here."

Damien didn't think he could filibuster much longer. He decided to take a chance the Captain would be awake by now. "Easy: you offer me and my mates jobs as summer school teachers grading homework assignments for the rest of our lives. I then tell you about some of the real work we have been doing – and planning to keep doing – for the real people in the real world."

Leeson's eyes widened. Was she surprised he was the one rejecting her offer instead of the inverse?

"Do you see how your job offer sounds significantly less enticing to me – and probably will to the rest of us – than what we have already been doing with our lives since long before we met you?"

"So there's no way you're taking the job."

Damien paused, pretended to think some more. "Nope, don't see one. Am I going to see Nathan and the Captain now, or are we just getting drugged first?"

Leeson got up from the desk. She opened the door, whispered something to the guards outside, then turned face Damien again. "Fine, I'll take you to the rest of your crew. Let's see if your Captain can be more reasonable than you've been."

Damien stood up, wondering if there was a universe the name "Captain June Harper" could be associated with the adjective "reasonable."


	3. Chapter 3: Nathan

Nathan was already starting to wish that he'd better savoured the good times while they'd lasted; Captain Harper was starting to wake up. Hopefully, she would remember that they had an actual problem to finish dealing with, and Nathan wouldn't need to worry about her first waking words being a question about why she was still dressed or anything like that.

"Hey, guys, is everybody done, or do you need me to go back to sleep?"

Nathan hoped that the impact of his face-palm would be strong enough that he would get to sleep through Rip van Kirk waking up. "No, Harper, you're not at an orgy, we were kidnapped by an _Army_ patrol. With _soldiers_."

That seemed to help Harper cut through the grogginess a bit faster. "Wait, when you say 'kidnapped,' do you mean the good kind or the real kind?"

Nathan just glared at her.

Her eyes were still mostly closed, but she nonetheless pulled herself up and sat to face him. "OK, Nathan, right? Where are Damien and Arachne?"

"Well as far as I know, Damien could still be unconscious – from drugs that I'm told _you_ suggested, I might add – and Arachne might or might not have been cannibalised into a bunch of garbage incinerators and tank treads by now."

Harper stood up, the second attempting being the more successful. She said, "OK, let me think," a bit louder than her previous near-whispers had been, and started pacing. "Let's see: if they were going to kill us, or even just let us go but Retcon us first, then they probably would've done it before we woke up from the truth drugs, since they don't exactly seem big on things like 'fair trials for POWs' or anything like that."

Nathan thought that that made sense.

"If they were going to draft us into service against our will, then they probably would've kept us separated lest we formed an escape plan together. No, no, no, they kept us here, left our memories of the facility intact, and they let you wait here with me while I woke up, so I'm thinking they want to offer us jobs here 'voluntarily' with death or Retcon as 'acceptable' back-up plans. Did I miss anything?"

Actually, Nathan hadn't thought nearly that far. "Um, sorry, Harper, nothing I can think of."

"Actually Nathan, come to think of it, there is: if they had us under truth serum for any reasonable amount of time, then we probably already told them our codes for talking to each other about possible escape plans, and we should assume that they already know about Arachne's hacking abilities. I'm guessing that you've been looking for anything in here that she could use to talk to us but didn't find anything?"

"You're right, I didn't."

"OK, so they clearly don't think that the 'mere AI' deserves to be part of this, this is obviously a 'real people' conversation to them." Every second, Harper was looking more and more like a venomous snake.

She glanced at the walls. "OK, now since we should assume that the guards were listening to that whole thing through the mikes in the room, I think that our best bet is to –"

And, speak of the devil, the door opened. Damien came in first, followed by the officer that Nathan had come to think of as "Colonel Scarface." Leeson closed the door behind them and spoke up before anybody else could. "See Damien, they're awake, are you –"

"That still doesn't answer my question about Arach –"

Next thing Nathan knew, Damien was on the ground and Leeson had her fist in the air where Damien's spine had been. Nathan started to run to them, but Harper signaled for him to wait.

Leeson picked Damien up by the collar. "For your information, _First Officer_ , Arachne appears to have been shut down since back when everybody was still on the surface. Our technicians have had no luck re-booting her, and we have no idea what her sensors are capable of or how to make her delete the memory from the same time you've asked to be Retconned."

Nathan started to get scared again. How exactly _had_ they gone about trying to hack into her mind?

He prayed that she wouldn't be allowed die here.

"Well, if she's still asleep," Damien managed to get out between breaths, "she couldn't have learned anything we didn't, and we just shan't wake her up until you drop us somewhere safe. Why couldn't you have just told me while we were walking here?"

Leeson didn't seem to buy that, but she didn't say so. "Because I wanted to talk to the Captain first, now would you please tell her what I told –"

"Don't worry, Damien, Leeson just wants you to relay us the job offer," which Harper finished by dramatically holding her arms out to pantomime blocking an attack. Clearly she too had been exposed to Scarface's policy of accepting the first interruption, then inflicting physical violence to punish all interruptions afterwards.

Leeson stood still for a few seconds, seeming to stare at some constellation behind the wall at Harper's back.

Damien broke the silence. "Oh, yeah, Leeson, did I forget to tell you by the time we got here, Captain Harper would've already figured everything out you wanted to tell her?"

Harper grinned. "Occupational hazard of venturing into the real world, luv, you pick up these nasty things like 'experience,' 'skill-sets' or 'competence.' Did Damien already give you our answer?"

Leeson stared back and forth between Damien and Harper with such venom that Nathan got the impression she would've given worlds to turn into a Gorgon then and there. "What the Hell is wrong with you people?"

Nathan decided to answer first. "Well, Scarface, on one hand there are people who respond very positively to being abducted. On the other hand, there are doctors for those kinds of people. I take it we didn't get the job?"

At this point, he felt it was a miracle that Leeson's heart and brain weren't going supernova.

"By the way, when you say 'I wanted to talk to the Captain first,' but made sure all of the humans were in the room when you asked her, did you mean 'I don't want Arachne involved in the discussion,' or was it –"

"Just shut up." Leeson turned around and walked out the door, gesturing for them to follow her and visibly stopping herself from doing something violent. "I'm done here. If the bosses want you so bad, then they can fire me for this, but I refuse to work with such juvenile anarchists, and I would be surprised if anybody here feels differently. You want to get out of here? Let's go. Guards? Cuff them again. Freaks? I am getting you the Retcon you want so desperately, you are recording a message telling yourselves that you shouldn't come back, and you are getting the Hell out of here before I get dishonorably discharged for shooting prisoners."

In spite of this, Nathan was suspicious that they would not actually be allowed to leave. If Harper was right that their captors knew how powerful Arachne's brain was, then they probably wouldn't take the risk that she didn't know anything. They would probably worry that she would just make it look like she had deleted something when she really planned to tell the rest of the crew later. In their defence, they would be right, but Nathan didn't think that being executed by an unusually intelligent firing squad would be much consolation.

Nathan didn't think they'd be able to fight their way out. They certainly wouldn't be able to get out of the handcuffs quickly enough, and even without counting the entire rest of the hornet's nest, there were too many guards shadowing them as it was: Leeson and another one in the front, 3 more on each side, and 3 in the back. Even with Harper's 51st century superhuman training, the three of them would never be able to take on all 11 soldiers at a time without anybody dying. 7 or 8 maybe, but certainly not –

He heard a siren screeching from the soldiers' headsets before seeing them drop to the ground, clutching their ears from the noise that even Nathan could hear from his distance away from any of them. He couldn't imagine how explosive the noise must be for the soldiers getting it directly.

Leeson grabbed the radio off of her belt. She was probably about to request backup, but before she could,

"Captain Harper, do you copy?" Arachne. Arachne was still alive.

Leeson's eyes magnified as she looked at the radio.

Nathan silently thanked God for keeping Arachne safe. "Arachne, you beautiful angel, are you all right?"

Leeson started to draw her firearm, but Harper – still handcuffed – tripped her and knocked her out with a head-butt. Harper then stood up, held her handcuffs against the wall, and hit them with her own cranium until they broke off.

Even Nathan hadn't known she could do that.

"Thank you for asking, Nathan, but you guys need to take a headset or the radio somewhere safer."

"Anything for you, beautiful," Harper said into the radio. "Guys? Over here." When he and Damien got to her, she snapped their cuffs off as easily as she had broken her own. "You two check the doors here to see if anywhere here is unlocked. Whichever of you find's somewhere first, stay on the door; whichever of you doesn't, cover the next corner while I carry Leeson over to the door. She seems higher up on the food chain than these other guys and I don't want her unsupervised when she recovers."

Nathan saw Damien get started checking the rooms on the right of the hallway, so Nathan took the left. Damien found a usable room first, and Nathan ran ahead until he heard Harper get "Toni Montana" into the room. When he ran back and closed the door behind him, darkness swallowed them, and the sounds coming from the door told Nathan that it was auto-locking. Within a few seconds, the lights in the room came back on. Nathan saw Damien tying Leeson's hands behind her back.

Arachne spoke up from the radio again. "Cliff-notes: I can talk through and listen to the communicators that the soldiers are wearing, but that's it. The cameras, data storage, and power distribution are all physical, nothing wireless. I can't see you, I can't guess where anybody is beyond what they're telling each other, I can't control the electricity beyond another EMP that I can't use again for about another hour, I have no idea when the auxiliary generators are going to start, and – this is embarrassing – I can't shoot through the walls yet; I wasn't protecting my cannons from the EMP as well as I thought."

Harper looked at the ceiling. "Well, the lights are back on if nothing else, so that's probably not good." Leeson – having apparently recovered from her head injury in the hallway – tried to stand up, but Harper pushed her back to the ground. "Listen, Ari, even if you've not as much information as you would like, do you at least have something resembling an exit strategy that we can work from, or do we need Nathan to make the physical systems more accessible for you first?"

"I'm actually not sure you want to leave yet, Captain. A few minutes ago, a soldier was told he was supposed to shoot a prisoner this week. They're testing genetic modifications to let people recover from fatal injuries, but only 2 subjects of that program are still alive because it hasn't worked yet."

Every face in the room paled with horror. Nathan's own, Damien's, and Harper's came from them finding out what kind of people they were dealing with, but Leeson's looked more like it came from getting caught. She was part of this. She knew what was happening, and she didn't want anybody to find out. Nathan wondered what could possibly have happened to her that would make her think that this kind of cruelty was the only possible solution. He prayed that she would be shown mercy for her crimes. By Harper if no one else, so that Leeson would at least live long enough to come to her senses and repent on her own.

Harper broke the silence first. "All right, change of plans. Arachne: keep an ear out so you can do the siren thing again in case the reinforcements are still wearing the same kind of headsets when they come after us. Nathan: find a router or something that you can use to give Arachne access to the rest of the systems; we need her to be able to see where everything is. Damien: do you have any ideas for how you and I should cover him?"

Leeson interrupted before Damien had a chance to say anything. "You people can't be serious! Are you actually telling me that you –"

Harper slammed her head into the wall. "You've not the right to speak except to beg for your life. I'm sure innocents have begged you for theirs; do you think you have a better chance than you gave them?"

"And what chance do you think the Daleks would have given them? You have heard of the Daleks, haven't you? They still have those in the 2800 years into the future that you're from? That's right, we lied to you. We have heard of time ships, because we've seen them being used by genocidal psychopaths to destroy entire systems worth of civilizations!"

Daleks.

Nathan's mind flashed back to the first time he had ever borne witness to the Extermination of a world by the locusts of Abaddon. He only barely held the tears back; this wasn't the first he'd seen a Dalek massacre drive the survivors to such sociopathic desperation that they would feel the need to mistreat fellow victims.

He saw Harper kick Leeson in the gut. "And it didn't occur to you to try fighting the Daleks instead? I know that when I was in the military, we didn't keep the Daleks from killing innocent people by killing the innocents first, we did it by killing the actual Daleks!"

"Do you think we're supposed to take that as encouragement? When time travellers from thousands into our future tell us there will still be Daleks thousands – if not millions – of years into theirs, is that supposed to tell us that people will ever be safe from them? Of course not, it tells us that we lost before we were even born! That the entire history of the universe has been written by the Daleks, dividing the civilizations that _deserve_ to live into either 'we massacred their children, their sick, and their elderly' or 'massacring them would've been a waste of time'!"

Nathan gestured at Damien and Harper to help him find something to use as a gag, but Harper countered for them to let Leeson keep talking for a while longer.

Leeson certainly wasn't showing any signs of slowing down anytime soon. "And even that probably won't last! The Daleks we've captured have been more saturated with temporal energy than any living thing we have ever seen! Not only is it theoretically possible for them to re-write history without falling victim to paradox themselves, but they have confirmed under truth serum that they have actually been doing so! How long, from their perspective, do you think it will take them to finish erasing the entire universe's memory of every other species that could've ever evolved without them?"

Harper seemed to be fighting the urge to spit in Leeson's face. "And you think that using same power to kill the survivors yourself is better than letting the Daleks do it first?"

Nathan just hoped it wouldn't have to go further than spitting.

"Of course it's easy for you to say that: you can't change anything! Even the temporal energy you've exposed yourself to isn't enough let you change established timelines anywhere near as much as the Daleks have! You are completely stuck in the history that you happen to have been written into, with no free will to do anything different!

"But us, here, we can! We can create a new race of people who are not tied to whatever timeline the Daleks have deigned to leave us with; people who can actually fix the problems that mortals cannot! You use temporal rifts like the ones above us as fucking _service stations,_ but we are using them to create soldiers that are biologically not bound by the same laws of time that we are! Soldiers with the true, perfect free will that you and I will never have! The free will to _change_ the fight into something other than what the Daleks decided for us!"

Time Lords. Nathan felt his heart stop when he finally processed the fact that Leeson was describing Time Lords. He'd spent so much time thinking that he would be prepared for whatever circumstances God saw fit to trust him with, and he still almost broke down in disbelief when he realised that the base was manufacturing Time Lords.

"And not even just to change the way they die fighting the Daleks, but the power to actually beat them! You find out that we're trying to breed soldiers that will _survive_ the injuries that they will sustain, and you're mad at us because it hasn't worked yet? If we don't try to make our soldiers stronger, then the Daleks will just kill them anyway!"

Nathan was starting to wonder why Leeson was being allowed to monologue for so long after being told to stay silent.

Harper put her hand Leeson's head. Then snapped her neck.


	4. Chapter 4: Damien

Damien couldn't believe he was hearing this. Sure, he'd grown up on the fairy-tales of "Time Lords" – demigods who could re-write timelines, control paradoxes, and recover from even the most grievous wounds – everybody from his time had, but the people in charge here were willing to kill innocent victims "just in case" they could get the same kind of regeneration to work in the real world? What had they been doing, poisoning their victims with rift energy to get the mutations?

He wasn't feeling good about Leeson's chances of getting out of this room alive. He started wondering if she could be useful as a hostage, or maybe –

The Captain snapped her neck.

She shoved Leeson's dead body against the table, and then watched it drop to the floor.

Damien kept his immediate thoughts to himself.

Nathan didn't. "Son of a bitch, Harper, you didn't need to kill her!"

She just glared at him. "Neither did we need her alive. Did either of you get your guns back?"

Nathan didn't answer her very quickly. "No."

Damien hadn't got his back either. "Sorry, Captain, I'm empty. Did our resident war criminal have anything on her?"

The Captain picked the body off the floor, dropped it back on the table, and started digging through it's uniform. "No grenades, just one blaster, and if it needs anything extra for reloading, she's not carrying it." She threw it over to Nathan, who looked as scared as Damien was he would drop it and it would discharge. "Is this enough like the blasters that Damien and I are used to, or are there special modifications that we need to know about before we try using it?"

Nathan started opening and closing different parts of the weapon. "Looks good, Harper."

"Awesome, thanks. Ari, is anybody on their way over here?"

"It sounds quiet near you, and I didn't hear anybody being warned yet that the comms were vulnerable, so I'm pretty sure that the silence is from nobody being there rather than from just not using anything."

"Thanks to you too, but I'd still feel more comfortable a little more information than that. Nathan, did you see anything in the walls that could've been covering a router or a switch or whatever they call them in this century?"

Nathan looked around the room. "I wasn't paying as much attention to the hallways as I was to our sheep-dogs, but this room looks too much like another holding cell. I don't think that they'd risk putting the nervous system of the whole fortress so close to people who specifically pose a threat."

So they would definitely need to head back out. Damien wondered how that would work. "So what are we thinking, Captain? Do we head back to where Arachne attacked the guards so we can get more guns from them, or do we get as far from there as possible?"

The Captain gave it a second before answering. "Definitely re-stock. Until we get Ari control of the cameras, they'll be able to follow us no matter where we try to go, and they're the ones with more control over the door locks and the lifts. Nathan, check the walls while Damien and I run back for weapons."

Nathan's eyes lit up. "Arachne, if you screamed into some of the earpieces we left on the ground while listening to the others, would you be able to plot a sonar map of this part of the building? Like in the 'Flying on Fire' movies, or that old Batman one?"

Damien got very excited when he heard Nathan say that, and he saw the Captain start grinning herself.

Arachne answered almost immediately. "Nathan, you are a genius. Nobody has got to your floor since I took out the soldiers already there, and it looks like there's a good router about 3 corners from you: head out of the room right, right again on the first corner, then 2 lefts. I'll warn you if any lifts sound active."

2 seconds. She had been given the idea less 2 seconds before she told them she had completely finished doing it. Damien didn't think he would ever cease to be amazed how fast she could work through things like this. "Wait, you hit everybody on the entire floor just now? Not just the dozen around us?"

"Actually, most of the building."

And here Damien thought the Captain was scary. "Wow, OK. Captain, should Nathan take a communicator so he can get started without us, or should we stay together?"

He saw her look at the blaster Nathan was still holding for them. "Ari says the floor will be clear for a while, we're clear." She threw the radio at him. "Keep the blaster, get started without us, we'll catch up. Ari? When Nathan unlocks the computers for you, I want you to find out which of the prisoners need to be taken out of here the soonest. Everybody ready?"

Damien opened the door and the three of them started running.

He reminded himself Leeson had been every bit the war criminal he described her as, she had been an enemy combatant in a warzone, and the soldiers here were probably trained to let each other die rather than be used as hostages. She would certainly have been too dangerous to be useful even if she had been left alive.

He just wished he could convince himself the Captain hadn't enjoyed the killing as much as she normally did.

Damien noticed their former guards lying on the floor. None of them were unconscious, but neither were any of them capable of putting up a fight. He managed to fit two belts worth of blasters around his waist, plus one in his hand made 5. The Captain put on three belts carrying 6. One of the guards had a rifle; Captain-Harper-of-the-1.2-minute-kilometre took that one. They each took an armour jacket. The Captain grabbed a third, almost certainly for when they caught up with Nathan.

He looked down at the prone figures on the floor. "OK Captain, I'm as loaded as I'm going to be. Do we kill these guys before they can recover, or do we leave them as distractions slash dead weight for the rest?" As though he didn't already know the answer.

"Definitely leave them. We can't be sure any of them were as personally involved as Leeson had been."

He blinked. Apparently he hadn't known the answer.

And then the Captain's eyes and grin got a lot wider. "Well, maybe we shouldn't leave them _perfectly_. The bosses do need test subjects for the super-healing programs, right?" She knelt down to gouge one eye out of each guard with her thumb before breaking all 10 pairs of index fingers.

Somehow, Damien stopped himself from throwing up.

Even amidst all of the screaming, he was still able to make out the voice of Arachne hacking into one of the headsets. "Guys? Nathan's not done, but I'm hearing a lift ready to open pretty close to him, and the people in it sound armed. Cover him?"

Damien answered first. "Roger that, Arachne. Do you see any way for us to flank them quickly, or do we have to go to him directly?"

"Head away from Nathan and take a bunch of lefts. I can give more specifics on route."

"All right Captain, which of us is covering Nathan and which of us is flanking?"

The Captain threw Damien the spare tactical jacket. "You get Nathan, I'll go around." The Captain picked up two of the headsets and threw one at Damien. "All right, let's go!"

Damien ran to rendezvous with Nathan. When he couldn't hear the Captain's footsteps anymore, he gave himself one minute to relish being away from her for a while longer.

He understood he was a soldier and she was his commanding officer. He understood lethal force could be required for good people to protect each other, and he was both willing and capable of such violence himself when it was necessary. He understood the Captain truly – well, probably – cared about the innocent lives at stake whenever she got into a fight, whereas most other "for the greater good" sociopaths let themselves forget about the people they were fighting for. He knew the Captain would never be as callous about collateral damage as would many others like her

He just wished he could convince himself the Captain didn't – on some level – thank the other sociopaths in the world for giving her an "excuse" to indulge her bloodlust, didn't thank them for inflicting cruelties against the innocent that she could punish after the fact.

When he caught up, Nathan was still doing, well, something technical to the computers and wires Damien would never understand.

"Thanks for getting here before any hostiles could, Damien. Arachne tells me you grabbed an extra headset, would you just drop it next to me?"

Damien set it down.

"And we have incoming?"

"Don't worry, the Captain ran around to handle them from behind." Damien smacked himself in the forehead when he thought about that sentence a second longer. "Guys, promise me you won't _ever_ tell her I just said that out loud?"

Nathan didn't seem to roll his eyes for more than a second before getting back to work. "Never even crossed my mind."

"I shan't tell her either," Arachne agreed.

Damien was glad at least that much was taken care of. He handed Nathan the spare jacket. "So, does it at least look like you can get Arachne access anytime soon?"

Nathan started putting on the armour. "Actually, no. I'm still figuring out which wires and cables are for data and which ones are for –"

"Well, how much longer do you think it will take?"

"Let's see, how would Harper want me to say it? Oh right, 'God damn it, Damien, I'm a hacker, not a miracle worker!' How was that?"

Arachne jumped in next. "Children, please, could you save the fighting for when, I don't know, soldiers start shooting you? The lift sounds like it'll be up in about 30 seconds."

Even 30 seconds was nowhere near enough time to risk distracting the Captain if she was busy trying to get into her own position; they would need to come up with their own battle-plan for this theatre. "Arachne, should I stay here with Nathan in case the soldiers get this far, or should I take the corner to the next hall over to make sure that they don't?"

"The headsets on this group are better protected, so I can't make noise, but I can hear. They don't believe mission control about Captain Harper running 'impossibly fast,' –"

Damien wasn't surprised. He still remembered the first time the Captain told him 51st century athletes could run 10 clicks in 15 minutes. And then proved it.

" – but they'll see her do it soon, and she's far more armed than both of you. You'll have time before they decide she's not the only threat. What do you think?"

Damien didn't think it was a good idea for him to have the con like this. Not after the number of pre-Harper military mates he'd killed trying to be the decision-maker instead of an advisor. Then again, deciding not to make any decision would be even worse, right? "I'll stay here. If I'm out on the front-lines and I get maneuvered into a corner, even the Captain wouldn't be able to run all the way back around fast enough to cover Nathan again, so I'll only go as far as this next corner and not go around until they get here." He heard the lift doors open.

Damien could already hear them charging from around the corners between him and them.

Then it stopped. "Arachne, what's happening?"

"There are 16 at a corner where they can either go right or forward, forward leading to you two, and 'mission control' just told them that Harper is waiting with a rifle around a corner down the hall to their right."

Nathan pulled another bunch of wires out of place. "So, even when most of them get across Harper's shooting range, they will still have to deal with attacks from two fronts, right? Would they have anywhere between us and her to retreat to if it gets too Persian for them, or would cornering the rabid dogs just force them to fight their way out?"

"I don't see any more detours between their end and yours."

Damien started to think he should start the fight closer to them than to Nathan. "Arachne, if I did head closer to them, is there any way they –"

Arachne didn't let him finish. "Get down! Harper's doing a 'Venkman'!"

Damien curled into a ball on the ground for when the shockwave hit, and he saw Nathan jump away from the wiring.

He heard a plasma-shot-followed-near-instantaneously-by-an-explosion – the shockwave being nowhere near as hard as he'd feared, but it was still a good thing Nathan hadn't been holding any of the electronics – then a bunch of yelling and even more shots.

"Nathan, Arachne, tell me one of you has something good?"

"Nathan won't tell me why he's dismantling the comm."

Damien turned and saw Nathan picking himself off the ground. "You're doing what?"

Nathan rolled his eyes. "Well, I can't get Arachne remote access to the building's brain without plugging something wireless into it first for her to talk through!"

Damien thought that actually made sense. When did technical stuff like that start making sense to him? Was Nathan just that good an explainer…

Focus. He started creeping along the hall around the corner from Nathan. "Arachne, how's the Captain doing?"

"She's good. Some of the soldiers are still stunned from the Venkman, and none of the others have tried running past her volley of – never mind, one of her blasters just emptied. They're making a run for it."

The corner to the hallway leading to the enemy was twice as far from Damien as was the corner to Nathan's. "Arachne, do I have time to run to the next corner, so I can cut them off when they get to that hall, or should I head back and wait for when they get to this one?"

"I don't know, but whatever you do, do it fast."

Damien didn't want to risk Nathan getting shot because Damien got himself killed trying to run down this hall after the next was overrun. Then again, he didn't want to risk Nathan getting shot because the other soldiers were shooting at Damien down Nathan's hall instead of this empty one. But neither did he –

"No more time, fall back!"

Fuck. Damien ran back and just barely got around the corner before the wall next to him started getting burned by plasma shots. He put his hand back around the corner and started firing blindly, but the shots peppering the wall past him weren't slowing down enough for him to feel comfortable.

His blaster was starting to overheat. He took one of the replacement blasters off of his belt while the first one cooled off, but he heard at least one of the soldiers start running down the hall. Damien wasn't a steady enough shot to try a Venkman from this vantage point, but maybe they wouldn't know that? Maybe the other guy would try to run back anyway? But if he called Damien's bluff –

Damien decided not to overthink this again. He picked up the over-heating blaster and started shooting again, but the advancing soldiers' armours were too effective for him to get any good hits in. He threw the blaster into the foray –

And one of the soldiers caught it and threw it even further back. Now Damien was down one firearm and hadn't taken any of them out. He took a couple more from his belt and, in spite of everything he learned in basic training, starting shooting two blasters simultaneously. In spite of everything, he actually hit one of them accurately enough for the man to fall to the ground, but the second one grabbed Damien and tried to pry the gun out of his hands. He jumped to roll with the impact – he might be able to get the gun back, but he didn't want her to break his arm – and hurled her against the wall, but she threw him to the ground and started shooting Nathan, who promptly hit the deck to dodge the blasts.

Damien heard the rest of the troops charging from their cover. He spun around and kicked the shooter to the ground with him. He couldn't get her firearm, so he tried to drag her to fight him in front of the advancing group. He hoped he could shoot them while fighting her and they wouldn't risk friendly fire, but they fired at her and Damien anyway.

He threw her to the ground just as she took fatal crossfire, then he ran back around the corner for cover as Nathan got back to the computer stuff. Damien tried to hold them off, but there were too many of them. They rounded the corner, guns blazing, and Damien heard Nathan scream and drop to the floor.

And the soldiers started falling. Plasma bolts – larger than what their own guns were firing – hit them from the side of the hallway that they had come from, and they turned and started ignoring Nathan and Damien to fire at the shooter flanking them.

The Captain had finally caught up. Once again, Damien was surprised to hear himself think the word "finally" as part of that sentence, but there it was: he was glad the Captain was here.

The enemy force was focusing on her instead, so Damien ran back and took Nathan's armour off to check the injuries. The jacket had absorbed the worst of the blast, but Nathan's shoulder and the back of his neck were still burnt. "Nathan, can you still move?"

"Barely. Did you just… take those guys by… yourself?"

Damien wished. "No, the Captain flanked them and they're ignoring us. Can you finish with the computers, or do you need me to try?"

Nathan laughed, but was interrupted when he wincing in pain. "Just… hold me up… OK, Aaron?"

Great: now Nathan was forgetting who was with him. "Nathan, my name is Dami –"

"Dude, that… was a… Moses joke. You do remember… him, right?"

Ah, but of course, how could he forget one of the greatest magicians of all time? He dragged Nathan back to the hole in the wall, and Nathan started messing with the wires and cables again just as the Captain ran over to the two of them.

"Bloody Hell, Nathan, are you OK?"

"I'll be… better if… this building has an… infirmary."

"Well, then you'd better hurry; Arachne said that we have a Hell of a lot more incoming. We won't be able to fight this many people off on our own, so we need to get the wireless up and running if we want to make it out at all. Damien, do you need me to hold Nathan up for a while, or are you good?"

"Now that you mention it, I think you should take a turn." He let go as the Captain wrapped her arms under Nathan's. "When you say 'incoming,' exactly how much do you mean?"

Arachne answered before the Captain did. "Every lift connected to your floor sounds active, and the electronics on the newcomers are just as protected as the first group's were."

"Great, so… out of Agincourt and into… Thermopylae."

Damien didn't have time to ask what Nathan meant. "Arachne, how much longer before you think your cannons are up and running again?"

"Too long."

Great. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and now boxed in a corner. Fat lot of good they were doing. "Captain, I hate to ask, but –"

"Got it!" Nathan threw his hands up for a second before wincing again. "Arachne… I think… you're good to go."


	5. Chapter 5: June

"Got it!"

June almost lost grip on Nathan when he jumped, but she managed to catch him.

"Arachne… I think… you're good to go."

The hallway flooded with the sound of machinery malfunctioning from all directions.

"I just stopped the lifts. Nathan, are you still awake?"

It looked like Nathan tried to force words out, but he just went even further limp.

Fuck. "Ari, he's out. Is there an infirmary close by that you can use?"

All of the hallways went dark except the one that June had just run through. Ari had control, all right. "I'll have neutralised the troops in the lift by the time you get there."

June felt the familiar tickle in her veins as she imagined how Ari might do that. "Damien, take the rifle from the floor and get a head start." As he started running, June shifted Nathan's unconscious body to her shoulders so she could carry him more easily, then she ran for the lift after Damien.

He still had the radio, so June couldn't talk _to_ Arachne until she caught up with him, but at least the cameras would make it possible to talk _at_ her. "Ari, if there are any doctors stationed in the infirmary, I need you to check whatever records you think will tell you which of them can be trusted. I don't want to be caught off-guard if the Powers That Be try to shut us down with an EMP after seeing yours."

She rounded a corner and saw Damien running. As she came up behind him, she yelled, "Could pass me the radio?" He held it out for her, and she took it as she passed him. "Ari, are you safe?"

"Yes, Captain. I've locked down my holding hangar, the floor you guys and the wireless connection are on, and most of the network's manual overrides. Would you like to hear the doctors first or the prisoners?"

"When Damien catches up." June came to the lift that Arachne had been leading them to. She lay Nathan on the floor and took a blaster from one of her belts. The lift door opened to show half a dozen troops and a massive Jackson Pollack of blood. All were either dead or unconscious from head injuries and various broken limbs, possibly even spinal damage.

June let herself enjoy a whiff of the coppery fragrance coming from the lift. "How fast were you moving that?"

"It was more the number of changes between up and down."

June whistled in approval, taking a few seconds to appreciate not having Damien around to patronise her. Sure, she trusted him – even more than he trusted himself, it felt like – he was a friend, she was willing to die for him, and she knew that he was willing to do the same for her, Ari or Nathan; but bloody Hell could he be a hypocrite about the two of them killing murderers in combat.

Damien caught up just as June was starting to clear the last body out of the lift. "Captain, do want to get Nathan or should I?"

She noticed how hard Damien was panting. And how hard she wasn't. "I'll get him, you catch your breath."

Arachne closed the door behind them and started taking them down.

June looked around at herself, the two beautiful boys of her life – one of whom looked like he was sleeping like an angel – and the extremely small lift they were standing in. God, she wished that this picture could've been part of something other than combat. And that she was their type.

She forced herself to focus. "Ari, do you trust any of the doctors here?"

"Yes, and the infirmary had so much computerised equipment that I was able to chase away the doctors we can't trust."

June would've loved to see that: mad scientists being chased out of their own torture chambers by their own machinery. "And once we get Nathan in good hands, which of the prisoners should we try to get out of here first?"

"Probably the two remaining Time Lords, since the only people who are going to be killed sooner are the carriers of viral weapons."

June thought that made sense. It was starting to look like they would have to contact the Shadow Proclamation for backup instead of shutting this place down on their own. Arachne probably couldn't even handle the number of safe prisoners that were being kept here, let alone all of the contagious; of course they'd have to get the fuzz involved.

She realised that she should've thought of that in the first place. Instead of fighting their way further into the complex – and getting Nathan shot – they should've just fought their way out and called the cavalry from the get-go. Arachne was a bloody time ship, she didn't need to worry about "not getting help in time."

No, that wouldn't have worked. Even if Arachne had timed it perfectly, they still wouldn't have trusted a wanted "serial killer" and her team of "Stockholms" without something resembling proof; Nathan and Ari had needed to get the computer records regardless of the exit strategy.

"Damien, which of us should take the radio when we start running again?"

Damien seemed thankful for a distraction from all of the blood. "If the infirmary has anything for communicating, whoever gets there last should use the radio to keep in touch with whoever gets there first."

June thought about how much the two of them had been running today, how tired she felt, how tired Damien looked, and how much Nathan weighed.

She was definitely getting there first. "Take it."

The lift stopped moving. The door opened and Arachne radioed, "Everybody out." As with upstairs, only one hallway was lit.

June ran out of the lift and down the hallway with the lights.

She passed dozens of cells, each containing an innocent more disfigured than the last.

Some had been tested – unsuccessfully – for fireproofing. Some had been tested – unsuccessfully – for re-growing severed hands and feet, arms and legs, tails and horns. Some were patchworks of numerous species that were supposed to be incompatible; for the most part, June could tell which of them had been grown with the genes pre-combined, versus which of them had been born normally and then added onto surgically.

A casual observer would've described them as "demonic" compared to the healthy, beautiful humanoids that he would've seen running the compound upstairs.

June only saw the people ripped from their families to die in the worst Hell she had ever seen outside of Skaro. Then it occurred to her that that was absolutely not what she saw.

Good people torturing psychopaths would've been Hell. This wasn't Hell.

Granted, the number of personnel that were still writhing on the ground from Arachne's siren was a good start.

She rounded a corner and saw the infirmary halfway down the hall, doors open. She ran through and put Nathan down on one of the medical beds. She looked at the doctors – a human, a humanoid-insectoid, and a bipedal-but-not-quite-humanoid reptile – and said, "I trust you've been briefed?"

They must've, because they got started immediately. The insectoid looked at her and confirmed, "Shan, patient unconscious, plasma burn to the posterior neck and shoulder, jik."

Did he just insult her in his language? June drew her blaster in case she needed to remind them who was in charge now. "What did you just say to me?"

"Shan, those were the injuries that we were told to treat, jik." He sounded confused at the question.

June was about ready to break his fingers. She aimed her gun at him. "I already got that part, dipshit, what about the first and last bits?"

He didn't look or sound as scared as she thought he would. "Shan, I was just saying that my name is Shanjik, jik."

That was not an answer she was expecting. "Seriously?"

He just nodded.

OK, so it was a just cultural quirk. June rolled her eyes and put her blaster down. She made a mental note to ask for more details later. "Ari, do you have anything in here that you can talk with?"

"Marco."

She turned towards Ari's voice, seeing the intercom that she'd passed on her way through the door. "How far back is Damien?"

"150 metres."

"Tell him to give me the radio when he gets here. Helping you guard Nathan is going to be a lot more restful than running to the Time Lords' cells, and Damien's been exerting himself a Hell of a lot harder than I have done." She thought for a second. "Also, warn him about Shanjik's verbal tic."

"OK, done."

Damn, June wished she could multitask that well.

She heard Damien running down the hall. She ran to the door, then he caught up with her and handed her the radio. As he headed into the infirmary, the lights changed to illuminate different hallways. June started running down the new path.

She passed even more personnel; none recovered enough to pose a threat. She wished she could afford to spend some quality time sending them to an early retirement. "Ari, anything I need to know about the 'Time Lords' before I see them?"

"Even by humanoid standards, they look surprisingly human."

June grinned at the thought that if Nathan were awake right now, he would probably say something pensive like: _"Or do we look Time Lord?"_

"Good to know, thanks."

"They're both psychics. Vulcan, not Betazoid."

And to think Ari hadn't even wanted to download _Star Trek_ the first time June told her about it. "Are there any other psychics here?"

"Yes, but none scheduled for execution. Do you want to get them anyway?"

"I'll start with these two, then we'll see from there. You did say there were two, right?"

"Yes, brother and sister."

June didn't think she wanted to know the answer, but she had to ask, "Were they … bred, or grown artificially?"

"Grown. There's just one blood sample that every Time Lord here comes from, and artificial wombs are considered more 'consistent' than pregnancies by surrogate."

One sample? "So, except for gender, the two are genetically identical?" June had never heard of a species that started with the genes and then shaped them into chromosomes instead of the other way around.

Then again, neither had she heard of Time Lords existing in the real world, so she felt that she had used up her skepticism quota for the day. She still could not wrap her head around the idea that she and Arachne – two very intelligent people who took great care to stay rational and grounded in the face of superstition – were having a serious conversation about the biology of Time Lords. In the sense of them being real.

"As far as the computers here can tell, yes."

June stopped to catch her breath. Had to happen sooner or later. "Have they always tried to make identical pairs?" She started walking.

"Yes, but it hadn't worked before. Nobody understood the biochemistry at first beyond hypothetical models, so there were various genetic 'glitches' at first, but the two that they have now appear to be the first perfect copies."

So the people here had taught themselves extra-dimensional bio-chem, basically from scratch? "Ari, how long has this place even been operating?"

"10 Terran years from the outside, but most of the prisoners and theorists are kept in time-accelerated units. Test subjects provide decades worth of data, while the experimenters outside see everything in months; theorists spend decades forming models from the old data, while the experimenters outside only need months before they have new models to test."

June thought that sounded bloody brilliant. How come the non-evil scientists from her own time had never used facilities like that? Then it occurred to her that she might have just not known about them; which would mean that if there were any, then they had been classified higher than even a "Captain JH"-level Time Agent had clearance for.

"The two Time Lords, for example, are each a little over 60 years old, but the military personnel here are largely the same as when the two were embryos."

June couldn't think of anything to say to that.

She came to the next lift. Arachne opened the door, gave June time to toss the bodies out, and started taking her further down.

It occurred to June that the people in the cells upstairs hadn't been moving in fast-forward from her perspective in the hallway. "Ari, why wasn't there any time distortion upstairs?"

"Those subjects required specific medical attention the most frequently. They couldn't risk turning the fields on and off for every complication that required doctors."

"Well, how bleeding considerate of them."

June wondered if this was a good time to ask about Nathan's progress at the infirmary. It had only been a few minutes since she'd left him there, and if the burn procedures in this century were as primitive as she thought they were, then she didn't want to lose perspective on how much time the doctors would need. If they needed to take a couple of hours, then June making herself neurotic every few minutes wouldn't help anything. She told herself to wait a while longer.

Fuck that plan. "Ari, how's Nathan doing up there?"

"Stabilising. They've stopped the burn from spreading, and the spinal damage is almost completely taken care of."

June hadn't even considered potential spinal damage. Had she made it worse by carrying him wrong when she'd been running?

She forced herself to focus on the fact that he was nonetheless getting better, so she couldn't have made it too much worse. "Good. You and Damien have to hurt anybody yet?"

"Nope, everybody's behaving."

That was an improvement from how the day had been going so far.

The lift stopped, and Arachne opened the door. June was ready to start running again.

"Welcome to the Psychic Wing, Captain."

June wondered if she should try to break more of the prisoners out right now, rather than just leaving everybody except the Time Lords for later. Objectively, it didn't seem worth the risk: once she got her own people out, the authorities would be able to get everybody out anyway, and apart from the Time Lords specifically scheduled for execution, the rest of the prisoners were probably be safer where they were than they would be if she got them into a firefight.

And then she started looking at the people trapped in the fast-forward cells. "Ari, which of the non-Time Lords can we afford to try getting out ourselves?"

"I'll go over the 'patient' records. When I have some ideas, do you want me to talk to you first or Damien?"

"Damien first. How are things on your end?"

"Getting harder, but I'm managing."

June finally came to the hallway where the trail of overhead lights stopped.

June looked around at the prisoners that looked the most human. She couldn't tell which were actually human and which were the aliens that Ari told her about.

Until she saw, sleeping in adjacent cells, a man and woman who looked all but identical: both looked exactly like humans in their mid-20's, despite apparently being closer to 60. Both were completely shaven, their skin deathly pale. They had the same square-ish face, somewhat softer on the sister but not overtly so. They were basically the same size: the brother at the shortest end of average height, the sister at the tallest end of shorter-than-average, both malnourished but not quite scrawny. Even in their sleep, both had the same empty expressions of abandonment; victims that had been born in cages, lived their lives in cages, and convinced that they would die in cages.

"OK, Captain, get ready. I just figured out how to turn the fields off safely, so I'll have their cells open in a few seconds."

They weren't going to die here.

Not anymore.

June looked between the two Time Lords. Her first thought was that it looked strange to see the two bodies suddenly go from fast-forward to normal speed. This thought was pushed aside when she saw the two of them wake up and jump from their beds.

June hadn't heard anything from outside the cells that could've woken them up. "Ari, how much noise did you make in there?"

"None."

June couldn't imagine what had woken them up. If the equipment hadn't made any noise when turned off, then what stimulus could've have been triggered when the temporal fields... No, June told herself that that was completely absurd.

And yet, there they were, as awake and alert as she was. The brother kept his distance, eyeing June from the safety of the furthest wall, but the sister ran right to the door, visibly astonished to see somebody who wasn't going to hurt her.

Arachne opened their cells. The brother started walking tentatively towards the open door, and the sister bolted out and started looking back and forth down the hall – probably seeing if anybody else was there – for a few seconds before running to her brother. As she helped him out the door, she looked at June and opened her mouth a few times, but didn't say anything. The two of them sat down and put their hands on each other's faces.

June wondered if they were doing something psychic, but decided not to ask until later. "Ari, do we still have time to get anybody else out?"

"Yes, Captain." Arachne changed the overhead lights again.

The two Time Lords got up. Both were standing straighter than they had been, and the brother's movements weren't as sluggish. The sister looked at June and asked, "You're getting us out?"

"Absolutely." June started leading them down Ari's path of lights to the captive that they were getting next. "So what were you two doing outside his room?"

"Dulling the pain in each other's minds so we can focus."

June figured that it had been something like that, but she was still impressed to hear it out loud. "You can do that?"

"Sure. Very temporary, doesn't 'cure' anything, but still better than nothing, right?"

The next thing June noticed was Ari changing the lights above them.

"Change of plans. Damien had me to look at those who'd come here most recently, but if these two can heal others' mental damage, then I'm giving you somebody who's been here longer."

June thought that made sense. She led the twins down the new direction. "So who do you have now?"

"Her name's Kyra Sylvan, though with everything that's happened to her brain, I'd be surprised if she remembers. Lived on Earth in the early 2000s, fell unprotected through a temporal rift and out of this one when she was about 15, spent the last 5 years being exploited because she turned into a telepath. Can't send, but can't stop receiving."

That didn't sound good. From what June had heard, psychics who got their power from temporal rift exposure were the ones who had the hardest time adapting to how their brains got changed. For that matter, she thought that being caught in a rift _or_ having to read people's minds would've been bad enough on their own.

She heard the sister ask, "Are you from another planet too?"

"Yes, I am." June thought about "Kyra" being pulled out of 21st Century Earth. "Do you get people here from other planets a lot?"

"Yes, but they don't come through hyperspace like you."

June thought it was quaint that the people here still called the Time Vortex "hyperspace," very 3rd Millennium Earth sci-fi. She was about to turn down the next hallway, but stopped when she realised that they'd known she'd been to the Vortex. "How did you know how I got here?"

"The radiation on you, it's like the people here who fell through the rift, even though yours didn't hurt you."

They could sense temporal radiation. Could they see it? Feel it? June had no idea what to make of that. "What?"

"It's like how the people who come here in space ships have star radiation on them, but not from the stars. The ships have the star radiation on them from the stars, and the people have star radiation on them from the ships. That's what your hyperspace radiation is like. Not somebody who fell through the rift, but somebody who was in a ship."

June was almost speechless. "What." She forced herself out of her near-shock and reminded herself that they were on the clock. "OK, we should keep going now." She started down the next hall. "My name is June Harper, by the way, do you two have names?"

"TL-13-Beta," the sister said, pointing to herself, "TL-13-Alpha," pointing to her brother.

Of course. Why was June surprised? "Would you like different ones?"

The brother shrugged. "Don't see why not."

As they came to where the lights stopped, June heard Ari opening one of the cell doors.

"Kyra" walked out just as June got near the door. June focused on her plan to escape, to have one of the Time Lords cover up Kyra's psychological trauma long enough for them to get her to a doctor, to force the authorities to come down here and save everybody that June couldn't, and to kill anybody who tried to stop them from getting out. She looked Kyra in the eye and asked, "Kyra Sylvan, are you ready to run?"

Kyra looked between June and the Time Lords that were running up to them. Her eyes looked thankful, but there wasn't a smile to match. "Absolutely."

When the twins caught up, June told them, "All right, 'Time Lords,' one of you two is starting without us, one is staying with me and Kyra. Whichever of you starts first, I want you to run as fast as you can. Don't worry about getting lost: my friend can turn the lights off in the hallways you shouldn't take." She spoke into the radio next: "Ari, show them?"

The lights flickered in a pattern as proof of Ari's control. "Aye, Captain."

Good. "Whichever of you two stays here, I want you to calm Kyra down the way you two calmed each other. When you and Kyra are done 'mind-melding,' I'll carry you to your sibling and Kyra will run after us. When I catch up with the Time Lord who started running first, I'll put mine down so that you two can stay together – and keep moving – while I run back for Kyra. If I catch up with you while I'm carrying her, I'll pass you for a little ways more. If were still far from where we need to be, Kyra will run ahead while I go back for one of you two. Is everybody clear?"

The twins looked at each other in confusion, but Kyra grinned at them – or at least tried to grin – "She is a very fast runner. It'll work."

Alpha looked at Beta and suggested, "I'll stay here, you start running?"

Kyra answered before Beta could. "Actually, I'd feel more comfortable with the sister."

Alpha must not have minded, because he started running ahead of them.

Beta put her hands on Kyra's face to make a psychic connection. And it was certainly a pretty face: nice and round for a lover's hands to run over, especially when she would be allowed to grow her hair back … June reminded herself that Kyra was hearing everything. She forced herself to think about the floor instead.

When they broke away from each other, Kyra started crying for joy. "Ashokrulillah. Ashokrulillah. Ashokrulillah."

June picked up Beta and ran.


	6. Chapter 6: Kyra & Shanjik

Kyra.

Her name was Kyra. It had been so long that she had forgotten that she had even forgotten it, but she had a name, and her name was Kyra.

She could barely remember how long she had been trapped, she could barely remember what life had been like for her before, and the impression that she did remember the strongest was that her family would probably have wanted her to stay imprisoned.

But she was getting out.

Kyra wiped her eyes, looked up at the woman who had let her out, and saw her carrying Beta to the elevator. Kyra stood up and started running too.

She made it a few feet past the first hallway corner before her legs started to hurt. She prayed for the strength to keep moving, but her legs were out of shape from so little movement over the last few years. As she stopped to catch her breath, she looked around at the other people, still trapped in their cells as she had been. It was strange for Kyra to hear their minds in fast-forward, but she could still tell how terrified they were of what might happen to them next.

Then she thought about the woman who'd gotten her out, the woman who had called herself "Captain June Harper." Kyra knew that if June didn't make it out because Kyra was slowing her down, then the other prisoners would never get out either, and it would be Kyra's fault for condemning them. She tried to run again, tried to force herself not to fail them, but she didn't get far before she felt her leg burst into pain. She screamed and fell to the floor, not even able to pick herself up this time. She wished June had taken someone else, someone stronger.

Kyra barely noticed June running back to her until June started to lift her from the floor, planning to carry Kyra on her back to the infirmary. June needed to know whether Kyra was strong enough to hold on to her, which would leave June's arms free to support Kyra's legs, or if June would need to hold Kyra's arms and leave the injured leg hanging.

Surely, Kyra didn't have the right to let her arms fail the way that her leg had. She told June, "I can hold on."

June turned around and knelt to the floor so that Kyra could wrap her arms over June's shoulders. Kyra grabbed her wrist, and June handed her a radio, asking her to hold on to with her free hand so that they could keep in touch with June's friends on the upper floors.

"Could you remind me how it works?" Kyra moved her fingers from button to button, paying attention as June remembered what each one did. It took a few seconds before Kyra felt that she could use it with one hand.

June reached back to get her own arms under Kyra's legs, trying to reassure her despite knowing how much the pressure was going to hurt her bad leg. She stood up and held Kyra's legs in front of her.

Kyra almost managed to stop herself from screaming.

June took off for the elevator, focusing on getting Kyra to the infirmary as soon as possible and hoping that her own friend "Nathan" was getting better.

Kyra couldn't believe that somebody had gotten himself shot trying to help her. "June, you thought about a bug-person named 'Shanjik' taking care of him, right?"

June thought about how Kyra was right, that it was "Shanjik" at the infirmary, and wondered how much Kyra knew about him.

She knew that June didn't need to worry. "He tried to get some of us out a couple times. Trust me, Nathan's safe." She could feel June's relief when she said that.

Kyra could feel that she and June were getting closer to the Time Lords. After all these years, Time Lord minds still felt bizarre to her, but she didn't care right now. All she cared about was that she was going to escape with them, and when she saw them waiting by the elevator door, she didn't need to understand them to be comforted by the fact that they were just there.

The elevator opened to reveal the bloody, broken bodies of the soldiers that had been left on the floor. The Time Lords jumped back from the door, and Kyra came close to vomiting and losing her grip.

"Sorry about the mess, but it's the only way back up, so just try to ignore it, OK?" June understood that the sight and the stench of such bloodshed would be traumatizing to the people next to her, she wished that they hadn't needed to be exposed; nonetheless, she personally relished the idea of the soldiers dying in agony as the elevator beat them up and down.

Kyra was mortified that June would enjoy imagining such violence. She prayed for Allah to make June think about something else, fearing what would happen to her if she asked June directly.

June remembered that a psychic could hear her and that most people couldn't handle "combat" as well as "soldiers" like her could. She stopped fantasizing about the earlier carnage, closed her eyes so that Kyra wouldn't have to see the blood and bodies second-hand, and focused instead on her friends in the infirmary.

For now, Kyra didn't care about June's twisted beliefs about "combat" or "soldiers." She just thanked Allah for making June stop reliving it.

* * *

Started Shanjik's patient "Nathan" to regain consciousness.

Asked the reptilian nurse "Skeerse" the patient, "Nathan, can you speak?"

Didn't the patient answer. Spoke up the bodyguard "Damien," "Nathan, it's OK. Arachne already scared off the potential double-crossers, these are the good doctors."

Smelled the patient relieved. Tried he to sit up, but held Skeerse him down, "Nathan, don't move yet. We've healed as much of the damage as we could under the circumstances, but your cervical and upper thoracic vertebrae are still fragile. You don't need to be under anesthetics for the rest, but you still need to lie as still as possible. Can you speak yet?"

Must he have understood Skeerse, because lay the patient almost motionless. "Yeah. Do you have anything for the pain, at least?"

Walked, carrying one of the injectors from the wall, the human nurse "Jacob" over to the patient. "This is a gleinonitrate mixture we learned from the Chula. Lowest risk of a reaction with the other drugs." Put the injection Jacob to the patient's arm.

Blinked the patient a couple of times. "Hey, who turned out the lights?"

Was Shanjik surprised. Was not this an unheard of side effect of the drug, but was it certainly uncommon for to kick in the blindness so quickly. "Shan, you should regain your vision within a third of an hour, jik."

Pointed the patient in Shanjik's direction. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"

Answered the bodyguard before Shanjik could. "His name is Shanjik, and his culture believes people should 'sign' the beginning and ending of every sentence with parts of their name." Rolled the bodyguard his eyes, a human gesture that had learned Shanjik signified annoyance.

Looked the patient towards his bodyguard. "Huh, nice. He an insect or an amphibian?"

Was Shanjik intrigued by the accuracy of his patient's guess. Wondered he from where could the patient have possibly gotten it.

Smelled the bodyguard's brain of similar bewilderment. "He's an insect, how could you possibly have known that?"

Answered the patient, "Raised to introduce himself repeatedly? Sounded like a species the breeds too fast for anybody to keep track of anybody else."

Released the bodyguard's brain a scent very strong of endorphins. Was clearly he impressed by his colleague's brilliance.

Was equally Shanjik himself impressed. Indeed, maintained a larger population the Malmooth species than any other, but had never once he considered that might the tradition have been connected. Had been xenocultural expertise valued more by humanity at large, thought Shanjik that would the patient have been the leader of his family, instead of the predator "Harper."

Walked Shanjik nearer to his patient, but noticed he that was something terribly wrong as got he close. Smelled the patient's breath of a new affliction.

Were not the computers registering that was anything wrong, so drew Shanjik a blood sample so that could he test for toxins or pathogens that were not the basic scanners finding. Sniffed he the sample as emptied he it into the nanoscope. Could not he himself identify anything dangerous, and would require the computers too much time, if indeed was there a new complication, to test the whole sample.

Thought Shanjik about the AI "Arachne." Asked he the bodyguard **,** "Shan, how much does your AI know about toxicology, jik?"

Narrowed the bodyguard's eyes, and smelled he to be breathing more heavily. Pointed he over Shanjik's shoulder. "Ask her yourself, dickhead, the microphone's right there."

Turned and walked Shanjik to the computer. Ignored he the bodyguard's accusation that didn't remember he his own infirmary's layout.

Didn't know Shanjik if would his culture's speech tradition confuse the AI, and couldn't he risk any delay just in case. However obscene might it be if had he been talking to a person instead of to an AI, said he simply, "Arachne, are you capable of identifying a contaminant in," paused he to remember the patient's name, "Nathan's blood?"

* * *

The elevator stopped.

Kyra's leg stung again from the sudden jolt. She managed to keep herself quiet this time.

June wondered what was happening upstairs that could've made Arachne lose control of the lift.

Kyra didn't find that comforting. "Should we ask her?"

June wanted to, but didn't think it was a good idea. She figured that if Ari didn't have her metaphorical hands full as it was, then the lift probably wouldn't have stopped in the first place. Whatever she was doing instead, distracting her wouldn't help anything.

* * *

"What makes you think there's something to look for?"

Wondered Shanjik why had been the AI programmed to simulate a tone of fear. "His breath smelled wrong."

"Then the lungs and/or throat are affected, that narrows it down. What other signs are there?"

Still weren't the basic scanners registering any changes to the patient's vitals. Hoped Shanjik that was he overreacting. Went over he to the patient, said, "Shan, I need to keep your eye open, jik," and lifted the patient's eyelid with his finger. Shone he a light in the first eye, then repeated with the second. Said he to the computer, "When either eye is stimulated, the left pupil constricts more slowly than the right."

"Then the muscles are being affected more than the nerves. What else?"

Spoke up the patient, "What's happening?"

Answered the AI, "We think you've been exposed to something, but we don't know what yet."

Reeked the bodyguard of sweat. "Son of a bitch, did somebody poison him?"

Of course not, had everything that had the patient been given been perfectly safe and necessary. The anti-volarigen anesthetics, the carboloxins to feed the stem cells around the burns, the gleinonitrates for the pain after waking up… No, not possible, refused Shanjik to accept that. Held he the patient's arm and sniffed where had Jacob injected "gleinonitrates."

Had Jacob lied. Didn't the injection point smell anything like gleinonitrates. Looked Shanjik at him. "Shan, what the Hell did you do to him, jik?"

Now was the patient starting to sweat. "What's going on?"

Grabbed Jacob a laser cutter and pointed it towards the patient, but was he hit by a plasma shot.

Lowered the bodyguard his firearm. "Arachne, find out what he poisoned Nathan with."

"Dorocate."

Didn't Shanjik have time to be surprised that had the AI answered so quickly. Yelled he to Skeerse, "Shan, get the dorolyse, jik," and turned to get a clean injector.

Aimed the bodyguard his weapon at Shanjik. "Stop right there!"

Was Shanjik getting tired of how always humans went for death as their first response to everything.

"Arachne, were these two involved?"

"No. I'm sorry I missed Jacob, but I just triple-checked; Skeerse and Shanjik are still safe."

Pointed the bodyguard at Skeerse, "You," and then at Shanjik, "what he said."

Didn't Skeerse move. Simply looked he at Jacob, unconscious and sprawled on the floor.

"Skeerse!" Berated Shanjik himself for resorting to such obscenity.

Started the patient breathing rapidly. "Somebody talk to me?"

"Shan, just calm down, jik."

Started the computers to scream that was the patient's brain activity becoming erratic.

Ran Skeerse over to Shanjik and handed him a vial of dorolyse. Loaded Shanjik the vial into the injector and shot the drug into the patient's neck.

Started the patient to gasp for breath, meaning that must be his windpipe constricting in response to the injection. Looked Shanjik up to ask what muscle relaxants had they the quickest access to, but saw he that had Skeerse already run across the room. "Shan, what are you getting, jik?"

Held he up a spray bottle for Shanjik to see. "Krykoline."

"Wait." Pointed the bodyguard his firearm at Skeerse. "Arachne, what is that really?"

"He's right, and krykoline can absolutely open a mammal's airway."

Screamed the computer that was the patient's blood-oxygen getting critically low. Started the patient to spasm, and held Shanjik him down to keep him from falling off the table.

Sprayed Skeerse the relaxant into the patient's mouth and on his neck. Took the patient a few deep breaths, and started he to calm down.

"Shan, you should try breathe more deeply for a while, jik."

Did the patient as was he told.

Anti-volarigens, carboloxins, dorocate, dorolyse, and now krykoline: had been he exposed to a much nastier cocktail than had been he supposed to. Still, thought Shanjik that if suffered the patient any more complications, then would numbness in the extremities probably be the worst of it. Would he be all right now.

* * *

Kyra felt the elevator start to rise again, slowly enough this time that the jolt didn't hurt her leg as much as it had when they'd stopped.

"Sorry about the bumpy ride, everyone."

June was just relieved to be moving again. "Ari, what happened up there?"

"Nathan was poisoned. He's OK now, but I was so focused on him that I lost a lot of control."

June feared that she would not be able to outrun anybody while Kyra was on her back. The Time Lords certainly wouldn't have a chance. "Are they sending any more reinforcements after us?"

"Yes,"

Kyra's heart sank; she was going to die here. She had been so happy that somebody was getting her out, but it wasn't going to work, and she was going to die.

"– but I don't think they'll be able to catch up with you. No promises on an exit yet, but I can get you to the infirmary, and we can regroup from there."

Kyra couldn't understand why Allah hadn't just let her die before any of this. Why give her the false hope that June would free her if she were just going to die anyway? She had already accepted that she would die here, so why would He make her hopelessly fight it again instead of letting her die with dignity?

The elevator stopped. The doors opened, and June and the Time Lords ran out.

Kyra had an even more dreadful thought: was Allah preparing her for Jahannam? Had she disappointed Him, and taking her from acceptance to misery was His way of showing her what her eternity would look like?

The whole time that Kyra had been trapped in the elevator of blood and death and cruelty, she had managed to hold her tears back. She couldn't hold them back anymore. She begged Allah to forgive whatever she had done to offend Him, begged Him not to abandon her to eternal damnation, begged Him to give her a second chance to serve Him better.

June thought that she was only crying because her leg was hurting, and tried to reassure her that they were almost to the infirmary.

Kyra managed to ask her, "What do you believe in?"

June believed that people were the most important thing in the universe. She believed that if somebody does not value innocent life, then he should not complain when somebody kills him. She believed that it was possible for a divine world to exist beyond the physical world, but that there was no way for anybody in this world to know one way or another. She believed that no deity worthy of worship would force people to neglect their own happiness unless their actions would be explicitly hurting innocents. She believed that since people should be helping each other anyway, they shouldn't worry about whether or not some God was telling them to do it.

She didn't seem to see the hypocrisy in thinking that torturing people to death – let alone enjoying it – was a good way to make the world better.

Kyra didn't think that June would understand why she was so afraid, why Kyra would "choose" to worship a God who wanted so much more from her than to just make herself happy all of the time. She kept her dread to herself.

Kyra felt the two Time Lords behind them stop moving. She couldn't imagine why they would do that. "June, look back."

June stopped, turned her head, and saw that the two of them were just standing still with faces that she felt looked quizzical. "What happened?"

They didn't get a chance to answer; the entire building started shaking.

Alpha held himself against a wall, but Beta fell to the ground and didn't seem to have an easy time picking herself back up. June had to struggle to keep her own balance, somehow managing to not drop Kyra to the ground.

Kyra still couldn't stop herself from screaming in pain again.

Alpha picked his sister off the ground, and the four of them tried to keep moving against the tremors.

Kyra heard June wanting to ask Arachne what was happening, so she turned the radio back on.

"Ari, what the Hell was that?"

"I'm sorry, Captain, I'm afraid I can't tell you."

Kyra couldn't believe how excited June got when she heard that. At least, not until she heard June's conscious thoughts catch up with the instinctive reaction:

Arachne claiming that she couldn't tell June something told June that there were time-travel shenanigans going on upstairs. Which told her that a future-Arachne had just jumped out of the Time Vortex. Which told her that present-Arachne would manage to escape sometime soon. Which told her that there was no way they couldn't escape for themselves with two Arachnes firing all sorts of super-cannons against the base to keep the personnel occupied.

And Arachne had to have known that June would be able to figure all of that out, which further told her that Arachne was just being a bloody smartass about "not being able to tell her anything."

They saw the door that June recognised as the infirmary. At that point, Kyra stopped paying attention to June.

There was a chance that she was actually going to get out of here.

Kyra begged Allah's forgiveness for doubting Him, for assuming that He had abandoned her when she should've trusted Him more. She should've remembered that Ayyub had suffered worse without giving up the way that she had, but now she had hope that Allah had simply needed her to endure one more disappointment on a path that – for all she knew – could still lead to true escape if He willed it.


	7. Chapter 7: Nathan & Damien

The infirmary roared with the echoes of explosions. Nathan inferred that they were probably Harper's.

He felt his bed start shifting beneath him. The tremors didn't feel very strong to him, but everybody else in the room seemed to have trouble standing. The surgical bed was probably stabilised to reduce movement; Nathan thought that was sensible enough.

Arachne's voice sounded distorted, so the speakers in the room were probably damaged, but Nathan could still understand her saying, "Harper is only a few seconds away. Are you ready for the other girl's leg injury?"

Nathan saw Damien move closer to the infirmary door, and it sounded like Skeerse and Shanjik were crawling on the ground towards the other medical beds in the room. "Arachne, what do you mean 'other girl' and 'leg injury'?"

"Harper got the two Time Lords and a human, but the human pulled a hamstring and Harper's carrying her."

Nathan smiled. Even the little things like that reassured him that there was hope for Harper after all. "So, should I stay in bed until the floor stops moving?"

"Shan, that would probably be safest, yes, jik."

He heard the door open, and he turned to see Harper carrying the new patient on her back. He was once again impressed by how Harper could remain standing while everybody else was on the floor.

She walked the girl over to one of the empty beds and set her down. Nathan lost sight of her when she stooped behind the bed, but when she stood up he could see that she was helping Shanjik and Skeerse to their feet. The two medics started working on the girl's leg.

"Jacob's awake!" the girl yelled as she pointed to the floor.

Shanjik and Skeerse's faces froze in fear. Nathan imagined that Damien and himself were probably doing the same.

He saw June looking in the direction that the girl was pointing. Before he could realise for himself where this was heading, she ran over and dropped to the ground.

The girl started pleading, "Wait, no! June! Please, don't, I didn't mean – " before being drowned out by the drumbeat of bone shattering against the floor.

Nathan looked at her, and he almost couldn't see her eyes through the floodwaters coming out of them. The poor girl was probably blaming herself for what Harper just did. "Harper, what the Hell were you thinking?"

Harper sighed at him. "That he tried to kill you. Quite recently. Do you remember that?" It sounded like she was rolling her eyes.

As if that made anything better. "1, he wasn't in a position to try that again, and 2, we're not the only people here."

Harper seemed to magically remember about the girl who'd just watched her. As Nathan forced himself to turn in her direction, Harper's own eyes started watering, and she took the girl's hand in her own. Harper picked the body off the floor and walked out.

Nathan wanted to ask why Harper hadn't said anything.

Before he could get the chance, the girl answered, "Psychic. She already said enough."

Nathan silently thanked her and focused his mind away from the thoughts that he wasn't planning on sharing. He wondered how long it would take Harper to crack a "kill you with my brain" joke. Assuming she hadn't already.

His heart sank when he processed that she –

"Kyra."

– Kyra had felt Harper's latest murder more directly than Nathan ever did.

"It's OK, I've been here a while. You get used to things." Kyra had probably intended for her words to be reassuring.

He forced himself to focus on something else, as much for his own sake as for Kyra's. It didn't look like anybody else was having trouble standing, so he Sherlocked that the tremors must have stopped. "Arachne, would it be safe for me to try getting up yet?"

The scanners started moving above and beside him. "Looks manageable, but no sudden movements."

Nathan tried to sit up, but couldn't get his shoulders off the bed. He then moved his legs off of the bed and rolled off instead, kneeling on the floor and holding his arms to the bed while he tried standing.

"Nathan, do you need any help?"

He appreciated Damien's offer, but answered, "If I do, then I probably shouldn't be getting out of bed yet to begin with."

Damien then asked, "Arachne, do you need me out in the halls for anything?" Nathan guessed that Damien was probably starting to feel useless from not having anything specific to do, even when he knew that people were trying to kill them. As opposed to Harper, who Nathan would've thought was feeling "bored" rather than "useless" if she'd said the same thing.

"Not yet. Everybody's focused upstairs, so your floor's clear for now."

He didn't see Harper come back in, but he heard her ask, "Nathan, Damien, do you know any good brother-sister names?"

Impressively, Damien's tone sounded quite level in response. "Captain, people have been trying to kill us for over an hour and yet you found the time to –"

Harper laughed. "That's not it. These two don't have good names, and they haven't liked any of my whole-universe ideas. Do you have anything Earth-specific that they might like better?"

* * *

Damien turned to see who the Captain was referring to by "these two." A young man and woman were just walking in from the hall, all but splitting images of each other. They were apparently having trouble standing, but each was holding the other up well enough to move. The man was rubbing his forehead, and seemed to be having a harder time standing than the woman.

He almost forgot to answer the question. "Like, just 25th Century or any before that?"

The woman answered, "I don't care."

So that's what a fairy tale creature sounds like. Damien was strangely off-put she sounded so normal. Depressed, listless, empty normal, but normal nonetheless. "Casual, or famous?"

The Captain jumped back in. "Well, these two are … mythical, how about a famous pair?"

Damien couldn't believe he was having a conversation like this. "Maybe Apollo and Artemis? Orestes and Electra? Luke and Leia? Simon and River? Jamal and Yesenia? Hassan and Kaleigh? Or do you want non-fictional like Edward and Æthelflæd, Wolfgang and Marianne, Hans and Sophie, Deshi and Jing-Wei…"

"Get Nathan back in bed!"

Arachne didn't need to say that twice. Damien ran over, lifted Nathan off the floor, and had him lying down again in what felt like half a second.

The building roared again as something exploded upstairs. Damien fell to the floor amidst the crash of medical equipment.

"Somebody move Nathan to a mobile bed. Not safe for him to walk yet."

Damien picked himself off the floor, then picked Nathan up and started carrying him again.

He heard the Captain ask, "Did you like any of those?"

The woman answered again, "Nope."

The Captain sighed, then yelled across the room, "Nathan, do you have any?"

"Well, in the stories I grew up on, Time Lords always had titles instead of names. _The_ Master, _The_ Monk, _The_ Valeyard …" Damien could barely hear him, so he didn't think anybody else could either.

"Shan, what does 'valeyard' mean, jik?"

So much for that hypothesis.

Damien felt Nathan shrug, or at least as much as the guy could being carried. "No one knows, but it's always spelled with a capital 'the.' Most of the linguists and mythologists that I've met just assume it's supposed to mean something specific."

Damien had never heard that one. Then again, that wasn't saying much; he didn't grow up on time travel the way Nathan and the Captain did.

"Captain, could you collect supplies to restock my sick bay?" Damien was glad Arachne changed the subject to something more relevant.

Until the Captain ruined it for him. Damien was always the first to admit he wasn't one of the world's greatest experts on reading people; nonetheless, the Captain's grin gave the impression she was more excited by the "stealing" part than the "medicine" part. "Sounds good. Do you have a checklist for what I should start with?"

"Just hold everything up and I'll tell you what I can't use."

The reptilian started rifling through the shelves, but the insectoid started screaming, "Shan, you can't –"

"Stop!"

Damien wondered what offended the bug more: the Captain interrupting him at all, or the Captain not letting him finish his verbal compulsion.

"Listen, doctor, I don't know how you forced yourself to work here for however long, but if the fireworks upstairs are anything to go by, then I don't think you need to worry about obeying them any longer."

Damien set Nathan down on one of the hover-beds. Nathan's eyes weren't moving away from the Captain's outburst, and Damien wasn't having much luck looking away either.

The Captain wasn't slowing down. "Frankly, if you're as good as my friend says you are, then you deserve to be compensated quite decadently for the trauma of being forced to hurt your patients." She got right in Shanjik's face. If she hadn't been complimenting him – more or less – Damien would've been worried she was about to start something violent. And then end it. "And really, we're the biggest reason why you're going to be free of your overlords in the first place. Don't you think that a good start to your revenge would be watching us put their medicine to better use? Spoils of war and all of that?"

Shanjik didn't say anything.

The Captain didn't say anything either.

Damien decided to change the subject before somebody got hurt. "Captain, should we leave Nathan here or move him closer to the door?"

"Move him. Even if we get surprised, one of our new non-combatant friends should have time to move him back."

Arachne pitched in again just as Damien started pushing the bed. "Since he's heading out anyway, Damien should escort the other test subject to you."

The Captain got her thoughts in before Damien. "Other who?"

Another explosion upstairs rocked the building. And then another one.

As Damien picked himself up yet again, he heard Arachne clarify, "There's another prisoner on your floor. When Damien gets him to you guys, the Time Lords should tell you who he is."

Damien looked over to the man and woman the Captain had brought in; the two of them were looking at each other and looked as confused as Damien felt. Unless confusion on Time Lords' faces didn't look like confusion on other humanoid species' faces, in which case Damien would have no idea what they were thinking, even by his own poor track record's standards.

Another explosion threw the floor again. As Damien tried to stand, he asked, "Shouldn't the Captain get him? If this building keeps moving, she'll be able to walk better than me."

"You can walk across a moving floor better than you can take fragile medicine from a moving wall on a moving floor."

Damien couldn't argue with Arachne on that. He wasn't sure how he felt about leaving Shanjik alone with the Captain, what with Arachne being elsewhere and Nathan halfway to crippled, but if Arachne thought it was a good plan, he trusted her Shanjik was safe. He headed out.

He managed to get about 5 metres past the door before another explosion.

* * *

Nathan watched out the window until Damien disappeared behind a wall.

He noticed that he was starting to feel hungry. Between the parasympathetic drugs he'd been on all day – first truth serum, now surgical anesthetics – versus the adrenaline of running through a firefight, he was surprised that his body was still sane enough to even recognise hunger. He started to ask if any food was available.

Before he had a chance, he heard Kyra say, "Alpha, Beta, could you find food for the man who's resting?" Nathan thanked her for her concern.

He heard an unfamiliar woman's voice ask, "What does he like?"

Nathan realised she was one of their Time Lords.

He stopped himself from worrying about that.

Kyra answered the Time Lord, "Well, this infirmary probably has food, food, maybe some food, and then more food. Surprise him?"

Nathan laughed, impressed that Kyra's spirits could be high enough to joke like that even after being trapped here.

She told him, "Those two have a trick for holding back mental pain. We'll probably be zombies again in about an hour or two, but it's nice while it lasts."

Nathan didn't think he would ever cease to marvel at the ways that God would give His people comfort in the darkness.

He heard an unfamiliar man – the other Time Lord? – ask, "Do you want the solid right now, or wait for the liquid packet to warm up?"

"I'd like to start the solid, please."

He handed Nathan a block of paste about the size of his palm.

"Thank you." Nathan took a bite, not recognizing a specific flavor but managing to get it down.

"What's your name again?"

"Nathan." He remembered her earlier conversation. "Have you picked one that you like?"

"Not yet. I've been dreaming of having my own name for as long as I can remember, but it never seemed worth the effort until a few minutes ago. Nothing I've come up with so far seems good enough."

Amazingly, Nathan felt his brain start acclimating to the fact that he was talking to a real-life Time Lord. "Might as well start somewhere. What's your thinking on the ideas that you dislike the least?"

"Alpha" shook his head. "Just general feelings, can't point to specific reasons yet." His eyes suddenly opened wider and he hurried away from Nathan's bed. "Oh, good. Don't worry, Nathan, the drink isn't on fire!"

Nathan hadn't actually been worried until Alpha pointed that out specifically as something that could happen. "Thanks, how is it cooking exactly?"

"Oh, you just shake the bottle, then crystal-catalyst, friction-spark sciencey-whatnot makes it boil, and I just remembered to add the powder-stuff that makes it cool again instead of exploding." Alpha walked back and handed Nathan the bottle.

"Thank you again." Nathan took the last bite of paste and washed it down, finding that the drink tasted much better than the main course.

He noticed Alpha look relieved. "What happened?"

"I don't know. I've been having a wicked headache for the last few minutes, but it just went away."

Nathan didn't know what to make of that.

"You know, my sister's actually got something like what you were asking me."

Nathan put the bottle down. "How so?"

"Ideas about why she doesn't like name ideas. She says her mouth likes the taste of the English words 'The Captain,' but that she's not comfortable defining herself as 'the one who controls other people' before anything else."

Nathan realised that he didn't know whether Harper and Shanjik were still at odds. He couldn't get a good look with the direction his bed was turned, so he had to ask, "Harper, are you and Shanjik getting along better?"

He heard Harper laugh. That was a – no, wait, that actually wasn't a good sign. "Don't worry Nathan, he's actually helping me and Skeerse inventory everything now."

Nathan sighed in relief and crossed himself with his rosary. Shanjik was safe after all. "Do they have anything in this century for Arachne to use?"

Harper started to answer, "Yeah, so far we –," before being cut off by another explosion.

"Wow, Nathan, these beds sure are stable." Nathan heard a clanking noise, probably Harper picking up vials from where she'd set them down. "I've never seen most of these, but Arachne didn't send me any red flags, so apparently we'll be trying things like plyrin- … pyril- … um, prylinorl- … "

"Shan, 'prylinolrek,' destroys many ferrophilic poisons that commonly contaminate oxygen-iron circulatory systems, jik."

Nathan heard Harper roll her eyes. "Thank you, Encyclopædia Insæctica."

Just 5 years earlier, Nathan would never have expected to hear an exchange like that between a) a serial killer and b) a doctor who had almost been on said serial killer's hit-list. Not for the first time, he wondered if Damien was still at the point where he would see things like that as being appropriately surreal.

* * *

Damien was about to run around a corner when the tremor of yet another explosion dropped him to the floor.

"DAMIEN!"

Damien looked over to see a young man running over to him. How did this guy know his name?

The man was wearing the same prisoner jumpsuit Kyra and the Time Lords had – which made his full head of hair surprising, all three of the other prisoners Damien had met so far had been shaved bald – but with holes burned all over the front centre-mass. The man helped Damien to his feet, and Damien noticed the man himself did not appear to be injured in the places where his clothes were burned. Now that Damien had a closer look, the man's clothing seemed to fit him more loosely than the others' had fit them. Perhaps he'd gotten his clothing from somebody else?

Before Damien could ask what happened to him, the man's arms were on Damien's neck and his tongue in Damien's throat.

Under better circumstances, Damien probably would've been pleased such a cute guy wanted to snog him instead of the Captain. At the moment, he was just caught off guard this was happening barely two steps from a warzone.

The man pulled away, and even Damien could recognise his look of embarrassment. "Right, yeah, sorry, you're not there yet, we should be going to the infirmary now?"

Not there yet? "Sure. The infirmary… Who are you again?"

The man weakly kind-of laughed. "You wouldn't believe me, we should just let the others explain."

Of all the conversations Damien could be part of on a day people had been trying to kill him. Not for the first time, he wondered if Nathan was still at the point he would see things like that as being appropriately surreal.


	8. Chapter 8: Shanjik

Smelled Shanjik that was the predator's bodyguard returning with a second male. Was the new male's scent very strange, as though had the body been producing identical vapors to the Time Lord "Alpha" some minutes prior, and yet had been exposed to temporal plasma and started producing entirely different vapors; mere minutes ago by the comparative strength of the original vapors. Knew Shanjik that was it not actually the Time Lord, could he see that was Alpha standing in the same room, and yet could he not think of any mechanism for creating scents so similar, let alone for changing them so quickly and completely.

Reasoned Shanjik that would he find out more for certain when the two men arrived anyway. Was there no point in speculating before then.

Took he the last of the medicine: that was a bottle of Calænyp for stimulating the production of blood cells in mammalian bone marrow. Held the pills he up to the cameras. Didn't the AI signal a negative, so put them he in the predator's "spoils" pile. The pile that had been he so against when was it first brought up.

Had not he even noticed that had he started to feel loyalty to his captors, and felt he ashamed that had he needed a predator worse than them to make him come to his senses.

Thought he about all of his patients that had he been forced to watch suffer their whole lives, about how had many of them been close friends with the two Time Lords now before him, and about how had the two of them been scheduled specifically to fear for their lives today. Yet when finally fought back somebody else and when was he asked to help her, was his first instinct to follow the rules that had the captors set for him.

Looked he over at Alpha and sister "Beta". Remembered he all of the fantasies that had Alpha shared with him – psychically and verbally – about the better places and lives that had he heard and imagined of the universe outside. Remembered he all of the times that had Beta gotten caught carrying illicit psychic messages from one captive to another.

Knew Shanjik that would never have they – or any of the other patients – been so slow to act, that would they have honored the dead and the dying, not the wicked and their servants. Servants like himself.

Heard Shanjik say the AI, "Guys, Damien and Alpha are back."

Now was the AI comparing the bodyguard's companion to Alpha. Had previously Shanjik been impressed by it's facial recognition software, now wondered he how had it too been fooled by whatever was he smelling. Looked Shanjik at Alpha, and appeared he and Beta themselves to be as confused as was Shanjik. Smelled the predator of excitement, so started he to ask her if she knew what was happening, but interrupted Kyra, "Shanjik, if June's right she probably shouldn't tell you yet."

Couldn't Shanjik imagine why not, nor why smelled Kyra so happy. Before could he ask, saw he come the bodyguard and new man into the infirmary. Looked Beta back and forth between Alpha and this new man.

Started the new man to speak, "So, yeah, let's see, how did this go last time?" Pointed he to Beta, "Yes, it's really me, you're not hallucinating. Oooh, nice word, 'halluuucinating,' I'll have to remember that one, " and then to Alpha, "Hi, me, I'm you. I'm from the future, I'm supposed to tell you guys to get to Damien and his friends' time ship so that you can do some stuff in the future, then come back to the past to make sure that everything happens right, blah blah blah, everybody ready to get out of here? Oh, right, of course not."

Was Shanjik speechless.

Asked the predator, "Beta, what does he mean 'hallucinating?'"

Didn't Beta answer for some time. "Well, my eyes are telling me that his body looks different, but my brain is telling me that's still my brother."

Smelled the bodyguard of confusion. "So, that's just a hunch you're telling yourself?"

Shook Beta her head. "No, most of the Time Lords who've lived here have been able to psychically recognize each other even when we weren't directly connected to each other. That's definitely him."

Spoke the patient, "Like a psychic version of if everybody but you was blind, you could tell if he looked the same even if he used a fake voice that fooled everybody else?"

Jumped the new man – apparently a second Alpha from the future – and yelled, "Yes, thank you Nathan, that was brilliant! Damien, would you get jealous if I kissed him right now?"

Mouthed the bodyguard, "What the," before biting his lip and saying out loud, "Not 'jealous' so much as I would warn you he's just straight."

Looked this Second-Alpha disappointed. "Oh." Turned he to the bodyguard. "Why?"

Interrupted the predator, "More important question – and believe me, I'm as disappointed as you are – but shouldn't your sister know you're a shape-shifter?"

Clapped Second-Alpha once and answered, "Right, sorry, my new brain's just all over the place, like, even more than usual. Our mad scientist friends had never gotten 'regeneration' to work, so nobody knew what it would look like if it did, but I just took a bunch of plasma shots to the chest, healed completely, and this whole shape-shifting thing happened completely on it's own. I'm guessing Beta and I'll have new bodies and brains every time we come back from the dead, can't wait to see what the next one will be like."

Didn't Shanjik know how to respond to that. Had he known that had regeneration been a more important goal of the Time Lord program than had been the psychic developments, but had not he even considered regeneration as a possibility for Alpha's scent in the halls outside turning into something else.

Asked the present "first" Alpha, "Wait, 'brain'?"

Couldn't Shanjik believe how quickly had he gotten used to thinking of both men as the same person.

Answered Second-Alpha, "Yeah, our brain must've shape-shifted too or something. I'm no biologist, I just know that the kind of personality changes we go through still feel very very weird. I'm still getting used to the new instincts and the new priorities and the, the, the, the…" Looked he around the room. "Hey, guys, could you go and pretend like I finished that sentence properly? Like I'm an adult with dignity and social skills?" Put he his hand to his mouth. "I am still an adult, right?" Moved he his hand on top of his head, then to the bodyguard's forehead and back to his own. "Yeah, OK, I'm still an adult. Why don't I feel like I'm acting like it?"

Smelled First-Alpha of dejection. "So, you mean I die as part of our brilliant escape plan?"

Reached out Beta her arm to touch his shoulder. "What do you mean 'die'? You're standing right there," pointed she to Second-Alpha.

Sighed Second-Alpha. Dropped he the excitement in his voice and turned it to comfort. "Remember when you were a kid?"

Nodded First-Alpha.

"We don't think exactly like that anymore either, this was just a lot faster than that. We start acting a bit different after we die and come back to life, but I'm still you. We don't perma-die or anything, we just grow up really really fast right after." Paused he. "OK, maybe more 'sideways' than 'up.' I'm not entirely convinced we really 'matured' in any way, but even if we didn't grow in a direction aligned with adult-ness, we still grew in _a_ direction. That's all this is."

Was Shanjik impressed that was this Second-Alpha talking far faster than had the first version ever before.

Wiped First-Alpha his eyes. "You promise?"

"On my life." Held Second-Alpha back a laugh. "That wasn't as reassuring as I thought, was it?"

Managed First-Alpha to smile at that. "Maybe you could show me what it felt -"

Shook Second-Alpha his head. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, June said that us 'mind-melding' would be very very dangerous, but trust me, it's not going to suck nearly as bad as you think it did. Even the plasma burns were only agonizing for the first few seconds."

Looked the two versions of the brother into each other's eyes for some time.

Broke the predator the silence. "So if you've already been through all of this, then what's the plan?" Until she spoke, hadn't Shanjik noticed that had everybody else been as speechless as had he been.

Spun Second-Alpha his fingers in front of him. "Let's see, future-me shows up in the infirmary, explains how regeneration works, then tells past-me and my – our? – sister to do the psychic healing thing so our emotional damage doesn't come back in the middle of a shoot-out. Start with Kyra, then you and this-me take each other, then you finish up with that-me."

Smelled the predator to be preparing to speak, but interrupted Kyra, "That would be faster, but I can't have male psychics inside my head."

"Why the Hell not?"

Started the two Alphas to say, "June, a lot of…" before stopping and giggling at each other when noticed they that were they speaking over each other. Finished First-Alpha, "June, a lot of people have things that make them uncomfortable. Don't you?"

Prepared the predator to speak again, but this time interrupted Second-Alpha, "As a matter of fact, she tells me that people forcing her to do things is a big one for her. Isn't that right?"

Nodded the predator. Said she through clenched teeth, "You are not wrong."

Quite loudly tapped First-Alpha his chin. "See where I'm going with this?"

Started breathing the predator more heavily. "That's not…"

Interrupted Kyra again. "Yes June, it is exactly the same."

Sighed the predator in defeat. "Fine. I think we've wasted more time arguing than we would've saved by pairing the four of you off, so Beta might as well take everybody one at a time at this rate."

Walked Beta over to Kyra, and put the two their hands to each others' heads.

Turned Shanjik to Second-Alpha. "Shan, what should the rest of us be doing, jik?"

Looked Second-Alpha away from the bodyguard to answer, "Oh, yes, you and Skeerse should be finding a psy-suppressant so that Kyra has an easier time once the shooting starts –"

Noticed Shanjik that was Skeerse already searching through the medicines. Wondered Shanjik why wasn't he waiting for the rest of the plan before rushing to any one part.

"– wow, thanks for the quick response, Skeerse."

Supported he Skeerse's haste. Of course did he, clearly wasn't his future brain any more responsible than the current.

"Ok, Shanjik, while he's doing that I need you to scan Nathan's spine again to make sure he's still good to move after all that shaking. Apparently, it would be 'dangerous' if I just told you what his result was…" Paused he before continuing, "…which makes it a good thing that I can't seem to remember a single word you told us about him." Pointed he to his past version, "Hey dude, could you start paying attention? I really feel like I should be remembering this part a bit better, we can eat the eye candy any time."

Reddened First-Alpha's face. Smelled his breath of his hearts accelerating.

Was Shanjik getting impatient.

Answered First-Alpha, "Sorry, I just saw the way you looked at him," pointing to the bodyguard, "and I was wondering when that happens." Turned the bodyguard's face as red as First-Alpha's.

They couldn't talk about this later? Was this taking too long.

Opened Kyra and Beta their eyes and pulled away from each other. Walked Second-Alpha to where was his sister seated and started a psychic link without bothering to finish the instructions from before.

Couldn't Shanjik believe would be he so thoughtless. "So should I get started now?"

Gasped all of Skeerse, Kyra, and First-Alpha.

Smelled the predator confused. "Of course, why haven't you yet?"

Expected she that would Shanjik too act when were not the instructions given completely? Didn't Shanjik reward that with a response.

Didn't it smell like any of the patient's damage was still dangerous, so took Shanjik a bottle of calcymite and an injector from the table. Walked he to the patient and filled the needle. "Shan, hold out your arm, jik."

"What for?"

"Shan, it's to make sure your bones don't heal incorrectly when we start moving you, jik."

Did the patient as was he told. Found Shanjik his vein and inserted the needle. "Shan, what did that feel like, jik?"

Didn't the patient answer very quickly. "That felt… blue. I've never actually felt anything I would describe as 'blue' before, but… that was definitely 'blue.' Is that good?"

Guessed Shanjik that would the patient want a specific explanation. "Shan, had you described sounds, then that would be a sign of nerve malfunction, but colors mean they're responding properly, jik."

Returned Beta and Second-Alpha from their trance. Said Second-Alpha with a grin, "Beta, you just missed Shanjik cursing, is that OK?"

Stared she at Shanjik. "He what?"

Simply stared Shanjik back at them.

Turned Second-Alpha to his present self. "Hey, me, when you connect with Beta, could you take care of her emotional damage? Turns out I can't do that anymore."

Was struck Shanjik speechless again.

Continued Second-Alpha, "I blame shape-shifting, can't imagine what else could've happened."

Was Shanjik thankful that appeared Second-Alpha to be taking this loss in stride – had he noticed that tended most aliens, humans in particular, to lose control of themselves in a crisis – but still worried him this specific development itself. Was the siblings' ability to suppress psychological pain one of the only things that had kept them functioning for this long; now was Second-Alpha saying that regeneration had erased the ability?

Kept himself calm, but dreaded Shanjik that would Beta have only a few hours of peak performance left if was First-Alpha's regeneration imminent. Hoped he that would Beta find a doctor with the cognitive training that did not Shanjik himself have, but didn't he hold out much hope: would no psychiatrist outside of this compound have any reference for Time Lord brains, and couldn't any psychiatrist within the compound be trusted.

Smelled First-Alpha to be sharing the same fear. "I can't? Well isn't that just wonderful."

Started the predator to ask, "Ari, can you –" but interrupted the AI, "Already on it." Smelled the predator of relief. "Oh, you are magnificent, you know that?"

Couldn't Shanjik understand why would not only the predator pretend to converse with an AI as would she with a person, but why too would she not ensure that was the machine truly performing the task that wanted she completed.

Unfortunately, guessed Shanjik that would the predator make a scene if tried he to call her out directly. "Shan, what are you talking about, jik?"

"Oh, nothing," said the predator in a singsong voice. "Just about how one of the greatest doctors in the universe is learning everything our 'friends' have figured out about Time Lords." Turned she to the two – three? – Time Lords and said, "I can't promise anything quick or perfect, but by the time we get back to Ari, I can guarantee that she'll have at least the start of a psychiatric program to work on with you."

The AI? Was Shanjik mortified; were machines for performing medical procedures, not for determining them. "Shan, shouldn't a person be planning that, jik?"

Was the next thing Shanjik knew was he lying on the floor and was the back of his skull sore. Was the predator on top of him with her hands around his throat. "Say that again. I dare you."

"Captain!" Sounded the AI to be afraid for Shanjik's life. Why an AI would need to be programmed to simulate that?

Released the predator Shanjik's throat. "Ari, I thought you said we could trust the bugger!"

"I didn't say he could trust us back."

"What." Was most of the aggression in the predator's system replaced by a scent of cognitive disorientation. Shook she her head, climbed off of Shanjik, and forced him to his feet. "Last time somebody said that about a member of my crew, Shanjik, the bitch ended up getting the Linda Blair special. Mean anything to you?"

Reached Shanjik to the nearest table to balance himself while finished he catching his breath. Just processed he that must the predator have jumped over it when attacked she him. "Shan, no, who are you talking about, jik?"

"Do you mean 'which member of my crew did you insult,' 'who was the last bitch to insult her,' or 'who was Linda Blair?'"

It was this difficult for to work the predator's own people with her? "Shan, in that order, jik."

Answered the predator, "The friend that you just insulted was Ari –"

The AI? A "friend" and "member of her crew"? She was serious? "Shan, aren't you a little old for imaginary friends, jik?"

Turned the predator's scent to rage as turned the bodyguard's scent to terror. "Captain, can't we deal with him later? So he's a dick, that don't make him a sociopath."

Took the predator a few deep breaths, glared at Shanjik, and turned to face Beta. "Are you and the other Alpha going to do the emotion trick before we head out?"

Held the bodyguard back a laugh.

Answered First-Alpha, "Seriously? We just finished."

Was Shanjik relieved that had they remained focused while had the predator been acting out. Did not he have the impression that would most humans have done the same.

Smelled the predator to be similarly impressed. "So what are they doing?"

Looked Shanjik in the direction that had the predator gestured. Had not he noticed that were the patient and Second-Alpha linking as had the other Time Lords been with each other.

Answered Beta, "Technology lessons. Next-Alpha says we're going to fight our way to a hangar and unlock Arachne's restraints. He showed me how to get to the hangar, and I just showed now-Alpha, so we'll be doing the navigating when Arachne's lights stop working."

Continued First-Alpha, "Damien, June, and Skeerse will be doing the fighting, but Nathan won't be able to help with the hacking. Nathan's giving next-me a refresher course, then next-me is going to teach Beta while Nathan teaches now-me."

Whistled the predator at Skeerse. "Ari didn't mention anything about you being a soldier-man."

Clearly didn't the predator know how felt Skeerse about "being a soldier-man." Didn't Shanjik imagine that would Skeerse take well to the predator reacting so cheerfully to learning of his experience.

Confirmed he Shanjik's prediction. "My world saw the crossfire of the Dalek civil war." Looked he the predator in the eye. "Why would you be so excited about the idea?"

"Excuse me?"

Couldn't Shanjik believe the predator's surprise. Of course would her disrespect of war trauma be received poorly by an army doctor; she was truly expecting anything else?

Turned the Skeerse away from the predator. Spoke he into empty space. "I don't remember being excited when my planet died. I remember Renegade Dalek squadrons working entire cities to death in the labor camps, disintegrating the weakest to the bone just to keep the strongest motivated. I remember the Imperial Dalek fleet burning entire continents to the ground, dozens of civilizations treated as a mere 'tactical resource' for the Renegades to be deprived of." Faced he again the predator. "If you'd lived through that when your brothers and sisters didn't, would you appreciate your soldiery being treated as 'exciting'?"

Now was Shanjik surprised to get a scent of genuine sadness from the predator. "You're right, and I'm sorry for your loss. How many of your people survived?"

Overheard Shanjik reassigning the Time Lords the psychic connections in the background: broke apart Second-Alpha and the patient, and linked Second-Alpha with Beta as linked First-Alpha with the patient.

Responded Skeerse to the predator. "Out of almost half a trillion from before the Daleks? About a billion left. We were able evacuate when the Daleks started focusing on each other, but last I heard we don't have a world of our own yet."

Put the predator her hand on Skeerse's shoulder. "And your family specifically?"

Surprisingly, didn't Skeerse remove the predator's hand. Answered he, with great effort to remain intelligible, "Before the war, I had 12 brothers and sisters, almost a hundred cousins, and about 20 of them had mates. We were expecting our first clutch of 7 nieces or nephews. By the time of the migration, I had 3 sisters and about 15 cousins left at a time when I should've been mated and with grandchildren." Lost Skeerse his control and started he weeping on the floor.

Knelt down the predator and wrapped her arms around him. Couldn't Shanjik believe that was he seeing this from one so bloodthirsty. Looked he at the bodyguard, and mouthed the bodyguard at Shanjik, "She's a strange, strange creature, buddy. This is pretty much normal for us."

Asked the predator, "Shanjik? Does he still see his family?"

Looked Shanjik at Skeerse for permission. Nodded Skeerse, so answered he, "Shan, no, not since the migration. That was … " reminded Shanjik himself that was the predator probably not familiar with either this planet's or Skeerse's planet's calendars, so calculated he the equivalent in the human race's ancestral standard, "… 4 Terran years ago, or about half a generation for his species, jik. Shan, he let his family leave without him because he thought he could do more good by joining their allies and fighting the Daleks, but he ended up getting stationed here, jik."

Smelled the predator of horror at the realization. Had she already been angry enough that was the military forcing doctors to torture their patients. Now that saw she that had a man been tricked into making great personal sacrifice to earn the "privilege" of practicing such corrupted work?

Had her rage previously turned largely impersonal, redirected at homogenous hordes of Daleks years and light-years away. Now was she returning to a far more personal rage against the war criminals of this very compound; war criminals were who not even an entire kilometre away, whom had she seen with her own eyes not even an entire hour before, and were even most of whom her own species.

Had not Shanjik noticed the Time Lords break off from their new arrangement of psychic links, but now heard he Beta, "Hey, now-Alpha, can you come back over here? This-you's understanding of the technology here didn't survive regeneration, I need to learn from you-you instead."

Didn't that sound good. "Shan, what do you mean exactly? Regeneration or not, didn't Nathan just teach him about the technology he needs, jik?"

Answered Second-Alpha, "Sorry, my new brain just can't comprehend tech-training the way it used to. I don't understand what I did last time when Nathan taught that brain, and it didn't help anything when Nathan tried to re-teach this brain."

Linked again Beta and First-Alpha. Had Skeerse calmed himself enough to stand again, and was helping the predator him to his feet. Asked the predator, "Alpha, are we almost ready to leave?"

Answered Second-Alpha, "Extremely close. As soon as the two of them finish…" pointed he to his sister and his first version, "we're going to make a run for the hangars, get Arachne out, and then it's all fireworks from there."

Despite the compassion mere seconds ago, started the predator to smell again of giddiness at the prospect of more death. "Sounds good to me. Skeerse, did you find the psy-suppressant Alpha asked for for Kyra?"

Answered Kyra, "Already taken care of; you were busy with Shanjik." Hadn't Shanjik even noticed how was Kyra too smelling of her own endorphins; must the voices in everybody else's heads already be quieting in her own. Certainly deserved she the reprieve.

Took the predator one of the weapon belts from her waist and handed it to Skeerse. Could Shanjik see two blasters and at least three replacement batteries. "I think these animals have given enough to you. Are you ready to give them anything back?"

Took Skeerse the weapons in one hand and saluted with the other. "Sir, yes, sir."

Disconnected the two Time Lords. Spoke First-Alpha, "Well that only took twice as long as it needed to."

Pinched Second-Alpha the top of his nose. "Do we really have time to do this again?"

Laughed First-Alpha, "Really? You don't think you wasted even more time on a bunch of mind-melds that didn't work?"

They were really wasting time arguing about who had already wasted the most time?

Continued First-Alpha, "You've been through this already, why didn't you remember to skip those?"

Turned Second-Alpha to his sister. "Beta, did I really sound this snippy all the time?"

Interrupted First-Alpha, "Well I should certainly hope so, I've been doing my best to –"

"Boys!" Glared Beta at her brother/brothers. "You two are over 60 years old, would you stop acting like children for two seconds?"

Mouthed the bodyguard, "60?"

Turned Beta back to the rest of the room. "Sorry everybody, we're good now."

Spoke the predator, "Ari, any problems we haven't covered yet?"

Was there no response.

Smelled the predator of worry. "Arachne, is something wrong?"

Answered Second-Alpha, "I'm not supposed to tell you that yet."

Seemed the predator to accept that. Raised she her voice. "All right everybody. Damien? Get ready to hold the doors. I'll run out first, then Skeerse, and we'll cover the front. Beta and present-bald-Alpha will follow next for when we need their new techno-wizardry. Shanjik and future-hair-Alpha will keep Nathan's and Kyra's beds moving while Damien follows and takes the rear…" was she interrupted by Second-Alpha's failed attempts not to laugh. Burned First-Alpha's and the bodyguard's faces with embarrassment.

Grinned the predator. "Alpha, I love the way you think and I sincerely hope Damien appreciates this, but unfortunately I need you closer to us than to him. You've already been through this, and it sounds like Ari's help is going to be unreliable, so I need you to tell your sister and… yourself…" sighed the predator and rolled she her eyes. "… when they'll need to do tech work, even if you-you don't remember all of the details. Are we clear?"

Started everybody moving. Headed Beta, First-Alpha, the predator, and the bodyguard for the door; grabbed Second Alpha the patient's bed, grabbed Shanjik Kyra's; and clasped Skeerse the belt, drew he one of the blasters, and joined he the group at the door.

Asked the predator, "Everybody ready?" Signaled not everybody an affirmative, but didn't anybody signal a negative. "Go!"


	9. Chapter 9: Kyra

"Are we clear?"

Kyra felt somebody start pushing her bed towards the door, and she had no idea who it was. Wonderfully, blissfully, absolutely no idea. For the first time in years, she wouldn't know until she either physically looked behind her and/or physically asked who was there, and this made her happier than she had ever imagined she could be. Just for the novelty, Kyra decided to see how long she could go before figuring out who it was. She couldn't believe that she was having so much fun with this.

"Everybody ready?"

Kyra hadn't known June was about to say that, and she had no idea what anybody was planning as a response. And she loved it. She whispered, "Alhamdulillah," just as June yelled, "Go!"

Kyra felt the bed accelerate, and she let herself fall back. Looking up, she could see that Shanjik was the one pushing her.

Kyra snapped her attention back to the world around her. Caught up in her own reverie, she'd forgotten that Shanjik had been torturing himself for the last minutes of her psychic awareness, and she couldn't imagine he'd had enough time to change his mind. He'd never struck Kyra as a particularly introspective type, so she granted that he'd probably distracted himself when June had given him something to do. However, that didn't mean that he'd truly talked himself out of his self-loathing, and Kyra worried about what would happen when he ran out of distractions.

She looked Shanjik in the eye. "It wasn't your fault."

"Shan, you can't -"

"No." Normally, Kyra wouldn't have imagined interrupting somebody like that, let alone someone with conversational rituals as strong as Shanjik's. In this case, however, she'd always known Shanjik to value information over niceties. She figured that correcting his faulty information as quickly as possible would be better than "politely" allowing him to cement it in his head any longer. "You made a small mistake in trying to protect the facility's supplies from June and her friends, and you were talked out of that mistake very quickly."

She felt Shanjik turn the bed around a corner. "Shan, I shouldn't have needed them to talk me out of it, jik."

Kyra wasn't about to let up. Allah was giving her the greatest happiness of her life; she didn't have the right to let Shanjik continue suffering. "Shanjik, you've been here even longer than I have. They spent – what, 10 years? – conditioning you to be afraid of acting out, and it took you less than a minute to break it once you started trying again."

Shanjik shook his head. "Shan, Harper and Skeerse are the ones who 'broke the conditioning' for me, jik. Shan, if they hadn't started looting, then it would never have occurred to me to do it myself, jik."

Kyra decided to take a different direction. "You're a doctor who's been working with human doctors for years, you should be familiar with our concept of 'triage' by now. Please run it by me?"

Kyra felt the bed turn around another corner. Shanjik wasn't answering. "Well?"

Shanjik relented. "Shan, if you have patients whose lives or deaths are dependent on the level of medical attention they receive, then it is immoral to pay more attention to patients whose lives or deaths would be certain regardless of the level of attention, jik."

That seemed like a good enough start. Kyra thanked Allah for making Shanjik agree to listen for a while longer. "So doctors need to be able to pick their battles instead of going after every little thing?"

Shanjik stopped pushing her. "Shan, that's exactly what everybody else has been telling me, jik. Shan, 'don't make waves, your patients need you, don't get yourself killed protecting somebody who'll suffer anyway.' Are you trying to congratulate me on a job well done, jik?"

So much for "good start." Kyra had had no idea that he'd already considered – and disregarded – that defense of his character. On one hand, she realized that if he'd been thinking that already without her noticing, then he must be even better at protecting his mind from psychics than she'd thought.

On the other hand, that meant that helping him was going to be even harder than she'd thought. "Shanjik, if you had been able to save people, but you allowed yourself to be convinced that you weren't able, then you would be right that doing nothing wasn't justified. If there weren't any opportunities for you to take, then is it still your fault?"

"Shan, even if there weren't any opportunities, it wouldn't matter because I'd stopped looking, jik."

Most people would probably have completely broken down in tears at this point, but Shanjik was still sounding intelligible. Kyra didn't know whether or not that was a good thing. "Shanjik, you've clearly spent a lot of time and effort coming up with ways to tell yourself you're a bad person, and clearly you've convinced yourself. If you tried spending the same amount of effort looking ways to say that you're a good person, do you think you'd be able to convince yourself of that too?"

"Shan, isn't every wicked person capable of doing that, jik?"

Kyra promised Allah that she would never ask Him to take anything from her again. She'd spent 5 years assuming that reading minds was part of the torture of this place, but now she found herself wishing that she could listen to Shanjik directly. "Well, technically yes, but wouldn't good people be capable of convincing themselves that they are evil in exactly the same way?"

Shanjik sighed. "Shan, fine, I'll try, jik."

That was better than nothing. Kyra decided to back off for a while. "Thank you." She sat up to see why she and Shanjik had stopped moving.

Skeerse was standing at a corner, looking down the next hall. He had his hand up, evidently to signal everybody in Kyra's hall not to move forward. Kyra looked around and saw Nathan resting about 10 feet to her left. Damien had a hand on Nathan's bed, but Kyra didn't see the man – who was apparently a shape-shifted Alpha from the future – who was actually supposed to be there.

Damien was supposed to be focused on making sure that the building's soldiers didn't flank them; why would Nathan's aide run off and make Damien split his own attention with extra responsibilities? "Damien, where did the other guy go?"

Damien sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Beats me. He just ran to Skeerse, grabbed him and maybe whispered something in his ear, I couldn't tell exactly, then ran around to the Captain's group." He looked down to his resting friend. "Nathan, he tell you anything before he bolted?"

"Nope, not a thing."

Clearly, Shanjik's self-loathing wasn't the only problem in this new group of… whatever they were together.

Kyra had been reading minds for 5 years now, but she still couldn't understand how anybody could be so selfish when there were lives on the line. Everybody in the group was basing their actions on a plan that they believed everybody else to be following; just this one person breaking his part would mean that everybody else was wasting their time.

She realized how many times she'd thought the same about Alpha since she'd ended up here. Maybe this new man really was him.

Then again, it wasn't much comfort if it meant that Alpha was the one sabotaging their escape instead of some stranger.

Before Kyra could say anything, Skeerse yelled "Get back!" and started shooting down the hall in June's and the Time Lords' direction. Kyra felt Shanjik pull her further back, and she saw Damien do the same for Nathan.

More shots flew down from the other end of the hall and scorched the wall behind Skeerse. Skeerse skirted to the far corner of the corridor, clearly trying to minimize his profile while he returned fire. Kyra wondered why he didn't just come back and fire from around the closer wall, but then Damien ran ahead and did just that.

Had that been Skeerse's plan all along: taking the exposed position so that Damien would have room to shoot from behind cover?

An explosion roared from down the hall, and the shooting stopped. Kyra heard June let out a "Boo-yah!" and saw the future Alpha run back from the next hall. "OK, we're clear!" He put a hand in the air in front of Skeerse. "Didn't I tell you?"

Skeerse stuck his tongue out and grabbed the future Alpha's hand. "No need to brag, it was a team effort."

So this had been an entire plan? Kyra forced herself to sit up. "Excuse me, what are you talking about?"

Skeerse opened his mouth to speak.

Future Alpha beat him to it. "There was a fire-team on the other side of the door, we needed them to think we didn't know they were there, so I told Skeerse to wait in the middle of the hallway and be ready to shoot while acting as though he wasn't ready. All I had to do was stand with my face in the camera blind-spot that Arachne told me about, and then anybody surveilling us would think that I was just being emotional about my friend having to shoot people."

Skeerse stepped in. "Then he ran over to where his past self was working on opening the door and told himself to take a break. The two of them – no, sorry, two of _him_ – waited in front of the door, I guess to be a more tempting target than me –"

"Right, yeah, that too!" Future Alpha rubbed his hands across his face. "The military have already seen how I got killed and shape-shifted into this, so we were hoping that they would either A) try to shoot both of me before the other me had a chance to regenerate at the correct time, thus changing the timeline and possibly giving themselves and advantage, or B) not want to shoot either of me in case the paradox of the other me regenerating in the wrong way would tear the universe apart. Either way, both of me would jump off to the sides of the hall once Beta opened the door, and the fire-team wouldn't be focused on Skeerse standing down the hall with a straight shot."

Did this man ever stop running his mouth? Kyra had always been disappointed that her version of Alpha was so quiet all of the time; now she wasn't sure how even his Time Lord lungs were keeping up with him.

Skeerse sighed and shook his head. He must be feeling the same. "So anyway, he knew that Damien would need to join in from the side of shooting gallery closer to you guys, so I just took the other side to give us both room to shoot."

Damien turned to the future Alpha. "You mentioned 'tearing the universe apart' as a risk in the plan."

Future Alpha grinned and put a pointer finger in the air. "Ah, but not a _real_ risk. Just something that the soldiers might _think_ was a real risk."

"But how can you be sure?"

Future Alpha looked at the ground and shook his head. "It was just, I could tell. I don't know how to explain what it feels like to somebody who doesn't already know."

Beta and the present Alpha came back to the rest of the group. Present Alpha asked himself, "Do I mind-meld with him to show him later?"

Future Alpha looked with what Kyra could only describe as longing at Damien before answering himself. "No, we haven't done that yet, and I don't know when we'll get the chance."

Damien looked at present Alpha. He shook his head. "OK, let's get back on track. Where's the Captain?"

Present Alpha pointed at his future self. "Oh, yeah, that's his fault."

Future Alpha took a deep breath. "Here's the thing, Damien: you, her, and Shanjik from the future came down too to make sure everybody gets out OK. You and Shanjik are on your way here right now…"

Damien put his hand over his face. "Oh God."

Present Alpha jumped in. "Apparently, right after the shoot-out, I'm going to tell June that the two of her get one minute together and have to stay dressed the whole time."

Kyra felt herself almost throw up. "Why would you let her do that?"

Future Alpha turned to Kyra. "Well, that's how it went when I was him," he pointed to his earlier self, "and nothing bad happened. Do you really think she'd like finding out that I messed with the timeline just to take 1 minute of making out away for no reason?"

"Don't you think that 'it's disgusting' should be a pretty good reason?"

Damien looked straight at her. "Kyra, right?"

"Yes."

"How long have you known Captain June Harper?"

Where was he going with this? "I don't know, half hour, hour maybe? I haven't really been keeping – " Kyra's memories of said timeframe came flooding back. " – Track. Oh." If Kyra was right about what Damien was saying, then that meant he was right too: Kyra's "problem" with Harper in that moment wasn't nearly one of Harper's more important problems.

"Well, I've known her just over a year now. If I'm going to risk time paradoxes to stop the Captain doing something, her kissing herself is not very high on the list."

So Damien had been saying what Kyra thought he was.

Skeerse started jerking his head back and forth between the two halls of the corner. "OK, everybody, I think it's time to go."

The future Alpha smiled happier than Kyra had ever seen him in his life. He ran over to the corner and gestured down the next hall down. "You heard the man, let's get out of here!" He ran down the hall and disappeared.

Kyra's bed started moving again. "Shanjik, what do you smell around the corner?"

"Shan, Second-Alpha is kissing Future-Damien –"

The present Damien and Alpha simultaneously asked, "What?"

Shanjik rolled his eyes. "Jik. Shan, both June Harpers are running back here from further down the hall. While I've never smelled myself from outside of my own body before, I can also only assume that my own future self is coming around to meet up with us, jik."

A man of Shanjik's insectoid species – what had he called them, "Malmooth"? – came into Kyra's view. From here, he looked exactly like the Shanjik she knew, but she realized that she didn't know how similar one Malmooth was to another. Hearing Shanjik think about his personal impressions of his people was one thing, but his mind had never given her anything.

Kyra wanted to laugh at her shortsightedness. The entire time she'd been a psychic, she'd begged Allah to lift his "curse" against her. Now, not only had she spent the last few minutes wanting her power back, but this new development even made her wish that she'd been _more_ powerful the whole time. She almost promised Allah that when her psy-suppressant drugs wore off, she would only ever take doses to turn the volume down, never enough to turn everything off. She stopped herself, realizing that she'd probably just be making exactly the same mistake of rushing to judgment all over again.

She yelled to the insect-man, "Shanjik? Is that you?"

The man yelled back, "Shan, no, jik."

The Shanjik holding Kyra's bed snorted. "Shan, I'll have to remember that, jik."

Damien slapped his hands over his ear. "Bloody Hell, would you two stop talking!"

Future-Shanjik gestured to the hallway behind him. "Shan, keep moving everybody, you're almost at the hangar where they're holding Arachne. Shanjik, do you and Damien remember how you got here from the infirmary, jik?"

Damien pointed to Present-Shanjik. "You, don't answer." He pointed at Future-Shanjik. "You, yes I've been keeping track of how to get here, thank you."

Kyra's bed rounded the corner.

Two June Harpers ran over from the other end of the hallway. One stopped next to Kyra's bed; the other ran past. "All right everybody, let's keep this short. I'm going first with Kyra." She pointed to the rest of the group. "Other me, you'll be alternately carrying Beta and First-Alpha like how we got to the infirmary. You three get over here."

The group of three did as they were told.

Future June pointed to the second group. "Shanjiks, you two get Nathan rolling. Skeerse and First-Damien, you two keep everybody alive." She turned to the corner ahead of them. "All right, boys, let's move!"

"Roger." Damien and the Future Alpha ran out from behind the wall.

June pointed one hand to Future-Damien and the other hand to the first group, "Damien, you lead the way for me and the hackers, then run back to everybody else when they catch up with me and Kyra," then pointed one hand to Future-Alpha and the other hand to the second group. "Alpha, you lead the way for everybody else." She turned to Kyra and grabbed the rails of the bed. "Kyra, I need you to lie down so we can go faster."

Kyra let herself fall back into the mattress.

A gust of wind rushed across her face as the bed accelerated beneath her. The ceiling blurred into an empty gray as it flew past her.

Kyra let herself lose track of the lefts and the rights as her bed turned through the building.

She looked to the woman pushing her. The woman who was more bloodthirsty and sadistic than even Kyra's captors, who was likely responsible for even more death and suffering than any one of them; and yet who Allah had given the same mission as her rescuers, who believed in her mission to save innocents for their own sake without any sense of coercion, and who would be willing to die for the sake of those innocents in accordance with her mission.

How did a person like that happen? Were June's friends able to wrap their minds around her existence better than Kyra was?

Kyra felt the bed come to a stop. She sat up and looked forward.

A large metal door filled the hallway before her.

June let go of Kyra's bed and walked to the door. She trailed her hand along the wall. She stopped, tapped the patch of wall where she'd put her hand, then traced a rough circle of about 2 or 3 feet across with her finger.

June drew one of her blasters. She turned some dial of the side of the gun, then placed the firing end against the wall. She pulled the trigger.

A line of blue and white burned through the air and into the wall. June started tracing the invisible circle she'd drawn with her finger.

Kyra realized that she was alone, crippled, with an armed, super-powered serial killer who'd already lusted for her at least once in the last hour. And yet felt perfectly safe.

Safer, in fact, than she had ever felt in her life, either before or after Allah had taken her away from Earth. How could that feeling possibly be considered to make sense?

"Shan, there they are, jik!"

Kyra thanked Allah for her friends' arrival. As soon as she did, she wondered if it said something about her moral convictions: she'd just realized that she felt comfortable around a woman whom she knew to be a psychopath; now she was going to let herself ignore the problem with her thoughts instead of working it through to the end and fixing them?

She decided that it probably wasn't a problem for the moment. Her comfort with June wasn't something that she was going to be able to figure out by herself, let alone in the less-than-an-hour span that Kyra had known her. Even if June hadn't been part of the breakout, Kyra would still have needed to see a therapist after everything was finished. June would just have to be one more thing for Kyra to work out with the more experienced professional.

The other June Harper ran past Kyra's bed. Alpha and Beta followed behind her.

The June Harper who'd brought Kyra here pointed to the area she'd cut from the wall. "See where this is? You'll need to remember for your turn."

The June Harper who'd just arrived held her hands out to measure the region's location on the wall. "OK, gorgeous, got it."

The future June – the one who'd cut the wall – took a small can from the knee pocket of her pants. "Remember, gorgeous, when you ask Ari for a cryo spray, remind her that this is one of those special occasions we've been saving the really good ones for. Not that liquid nitrogen crap." She held the can up to the cuts burned into the wall, then pressed a button on the top.

A thin mist escaped from the can. The slight hiss of the can was quickly overcome by a much louder crackling noise.

Future June put the can back in her pocket. She gestured towards her earlier self. "Keep paying attention. You'll need to hit the bottom first with one hand, then catch the top with both hands." She crouched about a foot or two, then ran her fist into the bottom of the circle she'd drawn.

A shattering noise filled the room. The circular patch ripped off of the wall, the bottom flying into the wall and the top flying out. Future June spun to the side and caught the top of the disk with her palms. She turned her head to face the Time Lords. "All right, you two are up." She ripped the disk the rest of the way out of the wall and threw it out of the way.

Alpha and Beta starting working on the machinery June had exposed behind the patch of wall.

"Shan, Captain Harper, are you ready, jik?"

Kyra looked back. Skeerse, the Shanjiks, and the bed with the unconscious Nathan came into her view first, followed by the Damiens and the Future Alpha.

The Future June ran away from the door. "All right, everybody, we're done here. Damien, Shanjik, and Alpha from my end, we're heading back to the surface to get out of here with our Ari. Everybody else, you get to the hangar, find your Ari, and make sure that Round 2 works the same for you that you saw us do it. Any questions?"

Kyra shook her head "No." everybody else that she could see did the same.

The group from the future broke off and ran into another hallway some distance back.

Kyra looked at the door that the Time Lords were trying to open. Even when she'd heard the determination in June's mind to get everybody out of this place, the idea of an escape hadn't felt as real as it did now. She thanked Allah for letting her live long enough to be a part of this.


	10. Chapter 10: Nathan & Shanjik (and AN)

Nathan woke up. When had he fallen asleep?

The first voice he heard was Damien. "Gasp! It's alive! It's alive!"

He forced himself to sit up. The present versions of the Time Lords were breaking into the control panel next to a large door, probably leading to a starship hangar. Was this where Arachne was being held?

He looked back and to the sides. Damien was holding on to Nathan's bed; Shanjik was holding on to Kyra's. June and Skeerse were covering the hallways behind them. "Damien, where's your future boyfriend?"

Damien covered his face. "What's the last thing you remember?"

Nathan forced his mind to focus through the haze in his memory. "Kyra asked me a question, then there was a lot of shooting."

"Well, after we took care of the people shooting us, me, June, and Shanjik from the future caught up with us and showed us how to get to the hangar. There was a lot of quizzing along the way to make sure we wouldn't get lost when it's our turn to be the future selves."

Nathan shuddered at the thought of two June's in one place. "Did everybody behave?"

Damien rolled his eyes. "I assume you mean the Captains? Yeah," he pointed to the man working on the door, "His future self was very clear on the ground rules about her bunking up with herself, and all the soldiers we ran into were taken care of too quickly for her to do anything psycho."

Nathan gave a prayer of thanks. He felt a tingle in the back of his head.

Footsteps ran up from behind him. "Shan, lay him down, jik!"

Nathan started to ask what Shanjik was talking about.

Every muscle in his body clenched into a death grip around his bones. Nathan's brain felt as though it were ripping in half. He couldn't tell whether he was breathing or not. All of his senses started to fade.

Something pinched at Nathan's arm. The pain across his body started to die down, then the haze lifted from his mind.

He forced himself to breath. "What just happened?"

"Shan, it wasn't quite a seizure, but that's the closest comparison I can think of, jik."

Damien clenched his hands around the side railing of Nathan's bed. "Any idea where it came from?"

"Shan, it smells like the different drugs he's been given today are interacting in a way that had never been recorded. This cocktail has never been combined in a single patient before, so I didn't know that the pseudo-seizure would happen, but now that it has, I'm afraid that his brain smells like it's going to happen again, jik."

Damien let go of the bed and smacked the wall. "And there's nothing you can do to stop it?"

Shanjik started counting on his fingers. "Shan, he'd been given carboloxins and anti-volarigens for the surgery, dorocate in the attempt to poison him, dorolyse and krykoline to treat the dorocate, and now jikanomeel for the pseudo-seizure, jik. Shan, I'm afraid that the cocktail in his system is becoming unpredictable enough as it is, jik.

Nathan took another breath. "So what do we do next time?"

"Shan, your next seizures should be weaker than this first one. Keeping yourself calm should be enough to stabilize you until we can get you to your ship's sick bay for observation. Can you do that, jik?"

Kyra laughed. "Shanjik, if Nathan's health depends on mental discipline, then he's going to be all right."

Shanjik turned to face her. "Shan, are you sure, jik?"

"Are you worried that his knowing how anxiety will make the seizures worse will make him anxious, and thus make the seizures worse? Trust me, I've never seen anybody have such an easy time as he has at not thinking about something."

Nathan laughed too. "Plus, your vote of confidence should also help."

The back of his head tingled in the same way as before. Nathan lay down in the bed and forced himself to breathe.

His muscles started to tighten and his brain started to burn, but Shanjik had been right about it not being as strong. The seizure ended in, to Nathan's estimation, about 15 or 20 seconds. "Was that shorter or longer than the first one?"

"Shan, –"

Damien jumped in. "Longer." He grinned in Shanjik's direction.

"Damien, was that really necessary?" Nathan forced himself to calm down.

Damien's jaw fell open. "Oh, shit. Shutting up now, sorry."

Nathan felt another tingle. He braced himself for another seizure.

This one was worse than the previous, though still not as incapacitating as the first.

Shanjik sniffed the air above Nathan's bed. "Shan, I stand corrected, the seizures will keep getting stronger. Would you like me to try another injection, jik?"

Damien glared at Shanjik. "Really? You're sure this time?"

Kyra raised her hand. "I have an idea. Can you push me over to him?"

Shanjik and Damien obliged.

Nathan sat up to face Kyra. "I'm all ears."

"You're an engineer, right?"

"Yes, specifically computers."

"If I asked you about Arachne's computers, would you enjoy talking about her enough that you'd distract yourself?"

Nathan smiled just at the thought of seeing Arachne again. "Thank you, that's a lovely idea, but no. She'd had a pretty bad time with the people who built her, so she's really shy about sharing herself with new people."

Damien put his hand in the air. "Maybe not her mind, but she loves showing off how her body works." Damien slapped his mouth. "Please tell me the Captain didn't just hear that."

Harper laughed in the distance. "Sorry, Damien, can't do that!"

Kyra shook her head. "Just ignore her for this. Damien, I take it you meant Arachne's mechanical engineering?"

Damien put his hand down. "Yes, thank you."

She turned her face back to Nathan, then gestured with her head toward the Time Lords. "What do you think? It sounds like I'm about to see Arachne for myself pretty soon, but would her construction be something you could distract yourself with?"

Sounded good. "Well, officially the production line are called _Morning Stars_ because each ship resembles a large disk with spiked clubs attached in the shape of an 8-pointed star. The crew spaces and most of her brain are in the middle section, about 16 metres tall and 40 metres at her widest, and the engine nacelles are at the ends of eight booms. The booms themselves are about 6 meters thick, the nacelles are spherical and about 10 metres across, and combined they measure about 35 meters long." Nathan's brain started tingling again.

He forced himself to ignore it. "Each nacelle has five cylindrical openings – one pointing out, two pointing to the left and right, two pointing up and down, each 2 metres in diameter and 2 and a half metres long – so she can control her thrust for an unparalleled combination of high top speed and high maneuverability. She's also one of the military models, so each engine covering is also dotted with a dozen cannons, some of which shoot plasma orbs, others lasers." The tingling went away without a problem.

Kyra nodded. "OK, so what kind of engines does she have?"

Nathan couldn't tell how interested she was personally, but he appreciated her concern. "Singularity drives. Each engine houses a black hole weighing in at – "

"WHAT?"

Nathan rubbed his ear. He forced himself to stay calm. "Don't worry. Each black hole is kept at a mass of around 110 thousand tonnes. You could stand less than a metre away and not feel any gravity, but you can also go more than a year between refueling stops before they have a risk of exploding."

Kyra blinked and took a breath. "Wow. I never knew black holes could be that weak." Her eyes widened again. "Wait a minute, what do you mean 'explode'?"

Nathan grinned. "All black holes give off at least a little bit of radioactive plasma that can be used as a power source, but a smaller one will give off more energy in the same amount of time as a larger one. For example, Arachne's 8 black holes together give off as much energy in one second as the largest nuclear explosion in human history. Whereas, if all of that mass were condensed into a single black hole, then the larger engine would only be one 500th as powerful as the 8 small ones." He felt like he was starting to sound like Damien; he wondered if anybody else noticed.

Kyra's eyes opened even wider. "Every. Second." She raised her pointer finger. Then she raised her middle finger. Then her ring finger. Then her pinky finger. Then her thumb. Then she closed her thumb. "And that happens all the time? Like, no way to turn it off?"

"Yes, but don't worry, she's not going to explode any time soon. Or ever, if we're careful about refueling the black holes before they get too small to control." Nathan wondered how much more detail he could go into. "What year are you from again?"

"Born in about 2000, lived on Earth until I was about 15 or 16, and I've been here for about 5 Earth years."

And Nathan's understanding was that "here" was only mid-23rd century. "OK, I'm not sure I can explain the extra-dimensional mechanics of time travel as easily as Hawking radiation, but the short version is that the time engines soak up all of the plasma from the black holes that's not being used as impulse rockets."

"Wow. And the rest of her?"

Nathan's brain stopped tingling. He realized that he'd been feeling the tingle for almost the last minute without registering anything. Arachne was almost certainly going to love hearing about how well this had worked. "Arachne's core is a large disk with a flat top, flat bottom, and rounded middle, almost like the Dalek ships that inspired Earth's 'flying saucer' fixation. Her three storyes are about 2 and two third metres each, separated by two platforms of about 2 metres each where she keeps her processors, and the hull is about 2 metres thick all around."

The Time Lord sister called out. "Here we go!"

Nathan looked up. Machinery roared to life behind the walls as the door opened to the hangar.

Harper called out in response, "All right, Damien, Skeerse, you two go first. Everybody else follow when they say it's clear, clear?"

Damien chuckled and rolled his eyes. "Roger that, Captain." He ran over to the door and pressed himself against one of the adjacent walls.

Skeerse ran past the non-combatants and pressed himself against the opposing wall.

The door opened to reveal the hangar just beyond.

The Time Lords crouched to the ground. Damien and Skeerse aimed their blasters through the doorway.

No shots fired.

Damien ran through first. Skeerse followed.

The back of Nathan's brain started tingling again. He looked around at the commotion around him – the Time Lords coming over to his bed to move him, Shanjik pushing Kyra's – he guessed that trying to continue his engineering speech out loud would be more stressful than relaxing.

He continued in his own head: details about how Arachne could decide how much brainpower she devoted to intelligence versus how much she devoted to sentience, how she refueled her black holes versus how she refueled her time engines, how her artificial gravity mechanisms differed from centrifugal and/or magnetic mechanisms…

His body short-circuited again, but not to the point of losing his wits in the way that he had the first time.

The pain started to die down again. Nathan took one more deep breath, then sat back up.

The first sight he recognized was a bronze-coloured "flying saucer," maybe 400 metres across.

Dalek.

Nathan jolted almost out of his bed. This was a Dalek warship.

His brain started to tingle again.

He forced himself to remember where he was: a horrifying Sodom and Gomorrah that had no place in any decent world and one that they would find a way to bring to justice, but one where any Dalek ship they ran into would be harmless. This was a manned ship, not a drone, and any Dalek crewmembers were either dead, dying, or wishing that they were. Even the innocent that had been taken had been shown no mercy; why would the organizations' most hated enemy be treated better than they?

The tingling passed more quietly this time.

Nathan looked around at the other ships. Most were Arachne's size or smaller. A few were larger, but none was as gargantuan as the Dalek saucer.

No ship looked exactly like any other. Nathan saw Terran designs, Zygon, Rutan, Nestene, Silurian, and dozens more that even he didn't recognize.

Many of the vessels didn't even look space-worthy. Those must have got caught in Time Rifts that opened within planets' atmospheres, possibly planets whose species hadn't even begun to fly into space yet.

None of these belonged here. There were no standardised designs that could've been part of an official inventory: every one of these ships – even the Dalek saucer – was the gravestone of a person or an entire crew of persons who did not deserve what had been done to them.

Except Arachne. Arachne was going to escape, she was going to put an end to this abattoir, and if all went according to plan, then at least most of her friends would be coming with her. Nathan asked that God give his friends the strength to make the plan work.

"Shan, is that your ship, jik?"

Nathan turned to Shanjik, then followed the direction that Shanjik appeared to be facing.

There she was. From Nathan's angle, most of Arachne was behind a Martian fighter/bomber, but he'd recognise a _Morning Star_ nacelle anywhere. He yelled, "We found her!" just as Harper yelled "Incoming!"

The next sound from inside the main building was a rapid series of whistles, followed by a small but noticeable explosion. Harper must've just pulled another Venkman.

Alpha asked, "Where did you see the ship?"

Nathan pointed. The Time Lords turned Nathan's bed in Arachne's direction and started running.

* * *

Smelled Shanjik the fumes of scorched flesh and plasma explosions. Was the predator's brain flushed with endorphins. Wondered Shanjik if realized the predator that was neither her love of death normal nor healthy, not even by human standards.

Accelerated the Time Lords' heart rates. Started they to sweat. Must they have started running. Turned Shanjik to follow them.

Saw he a ship matching the patient's description of _Arachne_ : extending radially several cylindrical projections from a round center, with ending each of which in a large ball covered with cannons and exhaust openings.

Opened a door from the ship's center, lowering to the ground as a ramp. Was Shanjik's strongest impression of the air from inside the ship that smelled it very clean. Were there many scents did not Shanjik recognize, but did not he get the feeling that were emanating any of them from filth or waste.

Looked Kyra up to face him. Smelled her brain of great joy. "Shanjik, you ready?"

Ran first the Time Lords up the ramp into the ship with the patient. Followed Shanjik with Kyra after they.

Saw Shanjik that was a large, transparent room in the middle of the space before him: perhaps 15 feet long, 15 feet wide, and reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Were there also two transparent elevators on opposite sides of the room, perhaps 10 feet by 10 feet. Were the doors to both elevators already open. Reached half a dozen ladders through holes in the ceiling; formed these ladders an 8-pointed circle with the two elevators.

Came a voice from the speakers in the walls. "Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen. My sick bay is on the first storey up, so get Nathan and Kyra into the lifts."

Started Shanjik pushing Kyra's bed towards the far elevator. Hadn't he been able to treat Kyra well enough for her to walk again, but wasn't she suffering anymore. Said he to the Time Lords, "Shan, you two take the closer elevator, Kyra's legs aren't as urgent as Nathan's seizures, jik."

Did they as they were told. Whistled the machinery as took the elevator them up to the sick bay.

Backed Shanjik into the other elevator. Pulled he Kyra in after him. Felt he the elevator push against him.

Passed the elevator through a little more than Shanjik's height worth of ceiling before emerging in the second floor. Opened the door; pushed Shanjik Kyra out.

Saw he the Time Lords push the patient into a transparent room that must be the sick bay. Opened an emergency pod next to them. Took they the patient out of the bed and placed him in the pod. Closed the pod door around him. Emanated a new smell from the pod resembling that of Chula nanogenes operating on a patient. _Arachne_ did use nanobots of similar design?

Pushed Shanjik Kyra into the room. Opened another pod next to the one in use. Leaned he over Kyra. "Shan, I need to pick you up now, jik."

Wrapped Kyra her arms around his neck. Put he his own arm around her waist. Straightened he his back to lift her from the bed. Reached he his other arm under Kyra's legs. Winced Kyra at the touch and smelled her pain receptors of activation, but didn't she let go of him.

Carried he Kyra to the open pod. Leaned he down to set her inside.

Wafted a new scent of mammalian sweat and scorched reptilian flesh from just outside _Arachne_. Presumed Shanjik that had Skeerse been shot and that were the predator and her soldier helping him into the ship.

Looked Shanjik around the room. Were none of the emergency pods large enough for Skeerse to fit inside. Would he need to be treated manually.

Heard Shanjik the ramp-door close downstairs. Dropped one of the elevators to meet Skeerse and the humans.

Smelled Shanjik a sensation in the two Time Lords' brains that had they never felt before. At least, not to his knowledge. Looked he over to them.

Were both siblings standing with hands to the wall. Looked neither one steady on their feet. "Shan, what's happening, jik?"

Turned Alpha to face him. Smiled he more joyfully than had Shanjik ever seen him smile before. "Arachne's in the middle of jumping to hyperspace. We're out. We're actually getting out."

What. "Shan, how do you know that, jik?"

Shrugged Beta her shoulders. "Hyperspace feels different from normal space." Flattened she herself against the wall. Made she the same smile that had her brother.

Came the predator and the soldier into the sick bay. Was the predator supporting Skeerse's upper body with her arms under his shoulders, while was the soldier carrying Skeerse's legs and tail. Was the soldier breathing and sweating more strongly under Skeerse's weight than was the predator.

Took Shanjik a whiff of air. Was Skeerse badly burned, but did not he appear to be bleeding internally.

Set they Skeerse down on a medical bed, larger than but similar to what had Kyra and the patient been brought in on.

Spoke the computer. "Alpha, go into the middle bottom cabinet for a box of large green patches of cloth, then take the red bottle from the shelf to your left. Skeerse, when Alpha gives these to you, just squeeze the bottle over your burns, rub the fluid in, then press the patches against the injuries until they stick to you."

Brought Alpha over the supplies. Started Skeerse patching himself up.

Wondered Shanjik what was the fluid that was Skeerse using.

Looked the predator to one of the speakers on the wall. "Ari, we out of the air yet?"

"Yes, Captain. We are completely inside the Time Vortex, my scan-jams are working perfectly, and it should be about an hour before Round 2 gets started."

An hour? "Shan, Captain Harper, why would it take an hour? I thought we were just going back to the facility to get ourselves out, jik? Shan, does it really take an hour for us to go back as far as we need, jik?"

Flooded the predator's brain with a mixture of exhilaration, which assumed Shanjik to be about the upcoming bloodshed, and annoyance, which could not Shanjik place.

Gestured the predator her thumb towards one of the ship's speakers. "Well, Ari's the one who said it, why don't you just ask her?"

The predator wasn't too old for imaginary friends? "Shan, why would I talk to a machine instead of a real person, jik?"

Gave off the soldier an odor of fear. Raced the predator's heart in preparation to attack.

Said the computer's voice from the speakers, "Captain, would you let me handle this?"

Calmed the predator herself. "As you wish, Ari."

What?

Spoke the computer again, "Beta, is your headache better?"

Mouthed the predator, "What the – " then bit her lip.

Answered Beta, "Yes, it went away as soon as we jumped to hyper – sorry, the Time Vortex."

"No need to apologize. Did your future brother explain how that worked?"

"Yes, he said that if two copies of the same Time Lord brain come close enough to each other within regular space, then they give each other painful temporal feedback loops. When we first land in the past, both of myself and my brother will be giving our past selves mild headaches and vice versa."

Joined in Alpha. "When we were in the building, her headaches didn't get worse because the future her stayed on the ship to keep her distance. My headaches, on the other hand, had gotten worse and worse because the future me was getting closer and closer with the rest of the future."

Continued Beta, "Then when he gets injured and regenerates into his next form, his headaches go away completely because the future him has a different brain, hence the feedback goes away."

Spoke the computer again. "Whereas you are going to be staying with me. Direct firefights put a lot of strain on my systems, so I'm going to need a lot of help keeping myself together when Round 2 starts. Are you for us to mind-meld so I can teach you how I work?"

The computer did just suggest a psychic connection?

Looked Beta to her brother. Nodded Alpha. Said Beta, "OK, where do I go?"

Answered the computer, "You're standing on my brain right now. Harper, could you show her a good place to open the floor up?"

Walked out Beta and the predator.

Felt Shanjik his heart stop. Hoped he with every ounce of his being that was he misinterpreting this. "What are they talking about?"

Stared Alpha and Skeerse at him.

Answered the soldier, "Your brain is capable of thinking, right?"

"Shan, yes, jik."

"And machines are not?"

"Shan, how could they? No machine can simulate an organism's brain, no matter how fast or powerful, jik."

"Not even another brain?"

Feared Shanjik that had he made yet another horrible mistake in a long line of horrible mistakes. Didn't dare he to answer the question.

Tapped the soldier his foot against the floor. "Arachne's body? Mechanical. Her brain? One of the most powerful, cubic metre for cubic metre, _biological_ computers ever grown in the universe's history."

Continued the soldier, "She is smart enough to keep track of everything her body is doing, she is smart enough to control her body more effectively than any normal person could control her, but she is still. A. Person."

* * *

Felt Shanjik himself wake up.

Was he lying on one of the sick bay's beds. Not inside one of the nanogene pods.

Raised Shanjik his left hand to his face and pinched he an antenna. Helped the pain to clear the grogginess in Shanjik's mind.

Took he a whiff of air. Was nobody is the room with him except the patient, and was the patient still inside one of the pods. Smelled he to be unconscious. Hoped Shanjik that was this due more to anesthetic than to injury.

Opened Shanjik his eyes. Looked he at the rounded hull of the ship forming one of the sick bay walls. Then looked he to the floor and the ceiling.

Registered in Shanjik's mind the fact that was all of this the skin of a life form that had he been unforgivably insulting towards.

Asked the "computer" from a speaker, "Are you OK?"

Tried Shanjik to ignore her. Surely did not he have the right to force Arachne to degrade herself by associating with him after how had he treated her thus far.

When had lived Shanjik on the Malmooth home world, had always he condemned when would others cut themselves off from painful relationships rather than try to rebuild. Had always he judged those people as being of weak character, and had always he ignored any who spoke in their defense as being victims of circumstance.

When had been taken Shanjik to this world, and when had found he that were isolating many of the torture victims themselves from contact with others, had always taken he that as a sign that were merely their psychologies built differently from Malmooth psychology.

Now felt Shanjik the urge to cut himself off as had he disparaged other Malmooth for isolating themselves.

Spoke Arachne again, "Shanjik, before today, I'd never heard of your species either. Can't you forgive yourself for not knowing about mine?"

Broke down Shanjik in tears. Had been he wrong that came the worst pain in the world from doing something to another person that could never the wronged party forgive him for. Now found he that felt being forgiven by the victim even worse.

Had not considered Shanjik the possibility that would the victims of his inaction at the research facility forgive him. When had broken the predator Shanjik's acceptance of his masters, had certainly tried Kyra to comfort him, but had not Shanjik taken her seriously. Had never Kyra been one of the people that had he personally watched suffer, and was always she one of the most touchy-feely people that had Shanjik ever met. Did not her forgiveness mean as much as would the forgiveness of another, and did not Shanjik believe that could be he forgiven by any victim whose forgiveness would he truly need.

Realized Shanjik that if could Arachne forgive him for degrading her, then might too some of the other captives forgive him for not protecting them. Now would he need to do something to deserve such treatment. Looked he to a speaker in Arachne's wall. "Shan, what time do we go back to the facility, jik?"

Answered she, "We're in position to start Round 2, and Beta and I only need a few minutes to get me ready for my part. Are you ready for yours?"

Nodded he. "Shan, yes, I remember, jik."

Spoke Arachne again. "Good. Everybody else is waiting downstairs, care to join them?"

"Shan, yes, jik."

Opened the sick bay door. "Best of luck."

Walked out Shanjik. Realized he too that would have he nowhere to go after was the escape plan finished.

Would not even his species evolve naturally for trillions of years, let alone be born the family that had the Time Rift taken him from. Could not he simply jump into the Time Rift and hope to end up in the same time and place that had his team first fallen in from, and feared he that would not be Arachne capable of going far enough into the future to take him home and explain what had happened. Found Shanjik the idea poetically appropriate that, for the crimes of inaction that had he committed here in the past, would also he have to accept his punishments in the past.

Reminded Shanjik himself to think about this later. Needed he to focus on finishing the escape first.

Stepped he onto the nearest ladder and started he climbing down to join the others.

* * *

 **Author's Note: I'd like to thank everybody who's still reading this, but my real life has gotten hectic over the last few weeks, and unfortunately I don't have as much written right as I'd thought I would when I started posting this. I only have 2 chapters left, and I've outlined both chapters thoroughly enough to know for a fact that** **I am going to finish this** **, but I may have to post chapters 11 and/or 12 on a bi-weekly basis instead of on a weekly.**

 **I am working on the two final chapters at this very moment, and I will certainly try to keep up with the weekly schedule that I've maintained so far, but if January 3** **rd** **rolls around and chapter 11 cannot be finished without sacrificing the quality of writing, then I won't feel comfortable forcing any of you to suffer through it.**

 **Until then, feel free to share your thoughts in the reviews: what you liked so far, what you didn't like as much, what you think might happen next…**

 **Also, if I do have to miss a week or two of updates and anybody needs more reading material to pass the time, then my absolute highest recommendation must go to the Firefly/10** **th** **Doctor crossover "The Man with No Name" by Frostfyre7.**

 **For that matter, I'd recommend reading it even if I do finish my own work on time :) Happy holidays everybody!**


	11. Chapter 11: Kyra & Damien

Kyra's face was covered in tears of joy by the time she finished her prayers.

She'd thanked Allah for taking her from the prison that had been her home for so long, she'd thanked Him for letting her live long enough to make it to this point, and she'd thanked Him for the people – even Captain June Harper – whom He had sent to rescue her.

She'd thanked Him for taking her to as wonderful a physician as Arachne: one who had healed her legs completely, who had fulfilled Kyra's request for a drug to counteract her psy-suppressants and bring back her power, and who had provided a second drug to keep Kyra's post-traumatic stress from crippling her mind.

She'd prayed that Shanjik would find the strength to forgive himself for his supposed involvement in the crimes against Kyra and the others, and she'd prayed that Allah would show both Shanjik and herself what they were supposed to do with their lives after the second stage of their escape was over.

Kyra picked up the blanket from the floor that Arachne had found for her to pray on. She started folding the corners together.

June came up behind her. She first apologized in her mind for enjoying the sight of Kyra's backside prostrated during prayer, then asked if Kyra wanted June to take the blanket back to the sleeping quarters for her.

Of all of the things June had to apologize for, Kyra decided not to worry about this one. She folded another set of corners together. "You caught yourself pretty well. I think we're good." She turned around and held the blanket out.

June took the blanket, then went to a ladder and carried it up.

Kyra walked to the airlock filling in the middle of Arachne's first floor, then laid her back against the transparent paneling. Kyra reached her right foot into the air, then pulled it back and put up her left foot. She looked around at the ring of ladders between the airlock and the metal walls. She imagined running to the ladders and seeing how many rungs she could jump up.

She looked around at the people around her. Alpha was sitting in a ladder while Beta crouched in the machinery under a removed floor-panel; their minds were as incomprehensible to Kyra as they'd ever been. Damien had changed into his tactical jeans, armor vest, and was cleaning a large plasma rifle - which he'd named "Ganymede" - wondering what was going to happen during Round 2 that would make him and Alpha fall so head over heels for each other. Skeerse was sleeping against the hull, dreaming about evil unicorns trying to freeze him.

Nathan was still unconscious in the sickbay upstairs, but Shanjik was just waking up. Kyra had hoped that a heart-to-heart with Arachne would make him feel better, but it seemed to be horrifyingly backfiring. Shanjik's self-hatred was growing to the point where he wanted to cut off a friendship with Arachne before one could get started, something which Kyra understood his species to see in the same way that humans like her viewed suicide.

Kyra turned her back to the other people and mouthed towards one of the cameras on the hull, "Arachne, please don't answer me in front of everybody, but is there any way for you to help Shanjik psychiatrically?"

A panel of wall pulled back to expose some kind of computer station. "FOR KYRA'S EYES ONLY" flashed across the screen.

Damien wondered what Arachne was talking about, but he understood that Kyra and Arachne needed privacy about something, so he didn't get up to see for himself.

Kyra walked to the computer, then hunched over so nobody else could see.

"I gave him something for emotional regulation while he was unconscious."

Kyra saw another camera near the top of the screen. She mouthed, "Thank you."

Shanjik climbed down the ladder from the second floor. He was going to be able to help with Round 2, but he wasn't feeling any better about himself.

Kyra ran over to embrace him. He started crying on her shoulder; his brain was a mess of questions and self-blaming.

Kyra decided to try his question about what Arachne's mind felt like. She whispered in Shanjik's ear-hole, "On one hand, Arachne's mind is as impossible to make sense of as Alpha's and Beta's. On the other hand, she is so much louder about it." Damien had mentioned that Arachne was uncomfortable sharing details about her mind with other people, but Kyra didn't think that it would be a problem. The only thing Kyra had "shared" about Arachne was that there were no details for Kyra to share.

June slid all the way down the ladder from the third floor. She caught sight of Shanjik in Kyra's arms; she kind-of stopped herself from taking that image further, focusing instead on how happy she was that Shanjik had accepted Arachne's identity as a person. "It was so nice to hear you'd seen the light, Shanjik. Anybody tell you what we're doing now?"

"Shan, no, jik."

June almost lost herself in her fantasies about the upcoming battle-plan. She'd already told everybody else, but Kyra got the feeling June could've explained the plan a thousand times without getting bored. "First stop, reinforcements. Have you ever heard of the Shadow Proclamation?"

Shanjik shook his head.

June debated how much to editorialize her answer. "Basically, they're a racketeering and extortion syndicate legendary for their partnership with a racial gang of mercenaries."

Damien interrupted, "By which the Captain means they are the closest thing the galaxy has to a unified police force for most of the recorded past and future."

Kyra heard Shanjik wonder how to respond to this new information about the world he'd found himself in. She whispered in his ear-hole again, "They may be rather biased on this note."

Shanjik remembered that the predator before him wouldn't hold even the greatest law enforcement in high regard. "Shan, of course, jik."

June continued, "Yeah, whatever. The Shadow Proclamation make the rules, every once in a while they stumble into a good one, and they send Judoon as their professional guns and muscle." She put her hand out with her pointer finger up. "Fortunately, they do have rules against the kinds of horrors taking place at the facility we got you out of. Arachne is in position to exit the Time Vortex right in the middle of a massive Judoon fleet, and believe me, they are furious at the number of murderers I've stopped that they were saving for later."

Damien made a silent comment about how June stopping the criminals by torturing them to death may have been the bigger problem than just her stopping them in general.

June licked her lips. "We're going to make them think that Arachne got damaged and fell into their clutches by accident, maybe rough them up a bit as though trying to cripple their Vortex drives, just to get them focused on us. As soon as Arachne's sure that they have a tracer lock on her, she is going to get the hell out of there. They will chase her into the Time Vortex with everybody they have, we are going to lead them straight to the facility where we found you, and Arachne is going to jump out of the Vortex and unleash a rain of Hellfire against the bastards." June noticed she was feeling light-headed after working herself up like that.

Kyra decided to finish for her. "The compound's automated defenses will start shooting us, filling the air with missiles, lasers, and plasma rounds, and that's when the Judoon catch up with us."

Kyra felt Shanjik's excitement as he realized what that would look like.

"Dozens of heavily armed law enforcement vessels will emerge in normal space just in time to be fired upon. They'll return fire against the attackers, the facility will focus on them instead of us, and we'll be able to teleport through the chaos." She yelled over her shoulder, "Skeerse!"

Skeerse woke up. He started to ask what was happening.

Kyra answered, "We're about a minute away from drawing the Judoon's attention."

Skeerse turned to Kyra, preparing to ask her how much of her power had come back. He noticed her holding Shanjik and started to ask how much Shanjik knew about the plan.

"The only thing left to tell him is that while he, June, Damien, and Alpha are breaking into the facility, you and I will be teleported to the Judoon commander's bridge to fill him in on the details of what's happening."

Beta yelled from the floor, "Everybody into the elevators!"

Kyra and Shanjik carried each other into the closest elevator. June followed them in. Alpha, Skeerse, and Damien ran into the elevator opposite them.

Arachne's voice filled the container. "All right everybody, the next few minutes are going to get very interesting, so I'll have to shut down my artificial gravity." Kyra heard the people in the other elevator hearing the same thing. "I'm taking you up to the middle of the shafts, then letting go of the lifts so that they slide through any impacts more smoothly."

Kyra watched as the elevator took her up. The second floor had an opaque storage compartment filling the middle, perhaps 40 feet by 40 feet. Kyra couldn't see the elevator on the other side. She did hear Damien and Skeerse thinking about a conversation Damien was having with Alpha: both agreeing that the other was reasonably good-looking but not understanding how either one of them was supposed to turn that into the kind of love-at-first-sight that neither one had ever held in very high regard.

In Kyra's elevator, Shanjik started to ask about the artificial gravity. She answered, "Arachne will turn it on if it's absolutely necessary to keep the walls from hitting us, but it would take too much brain-power for her to keep it up every second during a shootout."

Arachne interrupted, "Gravity shutting down in –"

June kind-of stopped herself from imagining what she, Kyra, and Shanjik could do while trapped in a small room about to go zero-G.

Kyra almost asked Shanjik to smack June in the back of her head. Then realized that would probably just encourage her.

"3. 2. 1."

Kyra closed her eyes.

"0."

The elevator floor disappeared from beneath Kyra's feet.

Kyra tried to remember whether she'd felt this perfect feeling of weightlessness on Earth. Swimming in water had certainly come close, but even that wasn't exactly the same. Nowhere near as freeing. Kyra hoped that she'd be able to experience this again someday, sometime under better circumstances.

Arachne spoke up again. "Just an FYI, this is about to get messy now."

Arachne's hull roared to life. June recognized the sound as Arachne taking fire from the Judoon ships all around. The machinery of Arachne's own cannons joined in the symphony of destruction.

June started imagining what it must look like outside: a ship emerging from the Time Vortex, allegedly from engine damage, completely surrounded by dozens of similar-sized Judoon cruisers and a handful that were far larger; the Judoon pissing themselves when they recognized Arachne as the _Morning Star_ that carried the legendary Captain June Harper from one battle to another, the commanders freaking out to make sure their subordinates didn't let Arachne slip through their fingers, plasma rounds flying in all directions … Kyra was surprised June didn't add moustaches for the Judoon to twirl as they hunted their "superhero nemesis" across all of time and space.

The roaring of the walls stopped. Arachne must have escaped back into the Time Vortex.

Kyra heard June's thoughts turn to the fictional inspiration for this real-life tactic. "Shanjik, I'm guessing that the words 'Leaf on the Wind' don't mean anything to you?"

Of course not, why would they? Shanjik had come through the Time Rift from trillions of years in the future, and his captors in this time hadn't given him much in the way of free time. "Shan, no, jik."

June looked forward to showing him. "Oh, then have we got a marathon for you to watch when we're done." The word "marathon" took June back to the other marathon she'd planned: showing the Time Lords the series that had coined the term "mind-meld" for a specific type of psychic connection. June then started rating the _Star Trek_ and _Firefly_ Captains from hottest to least.

Kyra wished that June were more interested in finding novelizations rather than focusing on visual adaptations. "Wait a minute." Kyra felt an amazing idea forming in her head. "Arachne, could you put me on speakers so I can talk to Beta downstairs?"

Beta's voice filled the elevator. "Kyra, Arachne says you want to – OW! – talk?"

Kyra chided herself for forgetting that Beta was busy holding a time ship together. "Sorry, do you want to wait?"

"No, I think I – GAH – should be good."

Kyra took a second to gather her thoughts. "When June was telling you about _Star Trek_ , did she mention that was of the characters was named 'Captain Janeway'?

June and Shanjik wondered where Kyra was going with this.

"Not specifically, but Arachne did mention it when we were supposed to be – ow, ow, ow – mind-melding about engineering together."

"Then you remember that the character's name was 'Kathryn' spelled R-Y-N, but that the actress's name was 'Katherine' spelled E-R-I-N-E?"

"Yeah, apparently – aah – It's called a 'Danza' if a character has – ow – the same or almost the same name as the actor, why?"

"I was just thinking when you and your brother were talking about new names for yourselves in the infirmary. You mentioned that you liked the sound of the English word 'Captain' but not the definition." Kyra had no idea whether Beta was following this train of thought to the end, but June and Shanjik certainly were, and they loved it as much as Kyra did. "Do you think that the name 'Katherine' sounds similar enough to 'Captain' that you might like to try it for yourself?"

The speakers fell silent for about a minute.

Beta spoke up again. "Did you just say – aaaah – Katherine with an 'I,' or Kathryn with a 'Y'?" Her voice sounded excited by the idea.

Kyra's heart leapt. "I said it with an 'I,' but do you like one or the other?"

Beta started whispering, "Katherine, Kathryn, Katherine, Kathryn." She spoke out loud. "You know what, yeah, I think I like Kathryn with a 'Y.' Arachne, you recorded this, right?

"Yes I did. That's how I remember things." Arachne sounded as happy as Kyra felt that "Beta" had her own name that she liked.

Beta – no, not "Beta," "Kathryn" – asked, "Could you play this back for my brother? I'd tell him myself, but I think he'd like the way Kyra led my through the steps better than I could repeat it."

Kyra heard through Damien and Skeerse that the recording had started in the other elevator. Both men looked at Alpha throughout the exchange; he seemed as excited about his sister's new name as everybody else was.

After the recording ended, Arachne added, "Sorry to be abrupt, but we're landing in real space in about 20 seconds."

Kyra felt the gravity start to turn on beneath her feet.

Arachne asked, "Kyra, have you ever teleported before?"

Kyra's mind flashed back to the last thing that had happened to her on Earth: her body being pulled in every direction, her eyes burning with colors that she'd never imagined before, her lungs neither breathing nor suffocating. "Does falling through a Time Rift count?"

"Nope, not even close. Teleportation is a little disorienting, but it's far too quick to become unpleasant."

Good to know. Kyra took a breath to brace herself.

"Here we go."

Arachne's hull roared to life again. This sound was different from that of the shoot-out with the Judoon.

Kyra didn't recognize it, and she could hear that Shanjik didn't either, but June did. Kyra told Shanjik, "That's Arachne's black hole rockets holding her in the air."

The rhythmic blasts of Arachne's cannons joined the steady roar of her engines. Kyra felt June fantasize about the destruction that Arachne was inflicting against the compound beneath them.

The floor jolted beneath Kyra's feet, throwing her against the elevator walls as enemy fire assaulted Arachne's hull. Kyra lowered herself to the ground and tucked her face against her knees.

"OK everyone, the Judoon should be leaving the Vortex in 3, 2, 1."

Even June's enjoyment of Arachne's shootouts, first with the Judoon and then with the facility, paled in comparison to her thrill at the two forces obliterating each other.

The battering against Arachne's hull stopped. The ground forces must have decided that the lone _Morning Star_ was less important than the massive army that had materialized from out of nowhere. That didn't stop Arachne from maintaining her fire.

Kyra remembered the other thing she'd forgotten to tell Shanjik. "Oh, right, Shanjik, do you feel any different physically from before you fainted?"

Shanjik hadn't noticed anything, but Kyra's question worried him that he'd missed something problematic.

"Don't worry, it's not a bad thing. They put you in a nanogene pod while you were unconscious, so your balance and coordination are going to be better than normal for about another hour or two. Remember how bad the infirmary shook during the explosions?" Kyra certainly remembered. It had been hard enough _before_ the explosions for Kyra to hold on to June's back with torn leg muscles. How could she forget how much harder it had become?

Shanjik hadn't forgotten either. To his recollection, the tremors had stopped sometime after the future Alpha had regenerated into his second form, but before Damien had brought that Alpha back to the infirmary.

Kyra continued. "That was even with the impact buffers. Everything outside the infirmary was even worse."

Shanjik tried to imagine running through tremors even worse than what he'd struggled through in the infirmary. No wonder Arachne had thought he'd need special nano-enhancements.

Still, he started to ask about side effects.

Kyra smiled. "Don't worry about that. Damien did the same thing, and if June's balance wasn't already amazing from 51st century genetics, then she would've done it too."

"Shan, not Alpha, jik?"

Kyra shook her head. "Arachne didn't have time to figure out exactly how Time Lord muscles worked. June will be carrying him for most of the way in."

Arachne interrupted. "OK everybody, the Judoon teleport blocks are down, and it looks like the facility's are going next. Everybody ready?"

Kyra was certainly ready. She couldn't hear Alpha thinking, but Damien, Skeerse, June, and Shanjik were as ready as she was. "We're all good that I can hear. Alpha?" She heard Skeerse and Damien hear Alpha answer "Yes."

"Teleporting out in 3. 2. 1."

Kyra closed her eyes again.

"0."

* * *

Damien felt his body pop out of the lift. The colours around him warped instantly from those of Arachne into those of the facility now under attack.

He pulled on the strap over his shoulder. Ganymede was still hanging against his back. Damien couldn't think of a reason the rifle wouldn't have survived the teleport, but it still relieved him to check. No amount of enemy blasters salvaged from firefights could ever measure up to the rifle that had been with him since before Arachne picked him up.

"Shan, I don't know where we are right now. Do any of you know where to go next, jik?"

Shit. Damien had been so focused on memorizing the _directions_ from the rendezvous he hadn't remembered the need for _landmarks_ to get there.

Alpha raised his hand. He had a hand on the wall, but it didn't seem to be helping him stand well. "You guys will be OK. This already happened once, so you don't need to worry about changing anything. Whatever you feel like doing, that's what you did last time."

Good to know. "Wait, what do you mean 'you guys' will be OK?"

"I don't know if I work the same way. The people who built me wanted me to come back from the dead and to be able to change the past, and clearly they finally got regeneration to work." Alpha started rubbing his forehead with his free hand.

Damien had forgotten how bad Alpha's headaches would get.

"Shan, what happened to your ability to perceive the results of your choices before you make them, jik?"

What?

Alpha answered, "Well, sure, I could find out what _might_ happen, but I don't know if I would actually be able to _do_ something to make it happen or not."

The Captain walked over to Alpha. "Yeah, let's not worry about that right now. We already got the plan to work once, so just do everybody a favor and try not to change anything, OK."

Alpha nodded. "OK."

Damien took a tentative first step into the hallway before him. Then he started walking. Then running. The floor and the walls were shaking like the entire planet were about to collapse, but Damien didn't trip a single time. He grinned as he realised this was what the Captain probably felt like all the time.

The Captain ran up next to him with Alpha in her arms. Damien looked back. Shanjik wasn't falling flat on his face, but he was still struggling to keep up. Was this really the best Arachne's nanogenes had been able to do for him?

Damien reminded himself Arachne hadn't heard of any "Malmooth" before a few hours ago. He supposed he should be glad she'd been able to help Shanjik even this much. "Captain, do you want to carry Shanjik and I'll carry Alpha the rest of the way, or do you want to leapfrog a bit?"

The Captain grinned, hopefully not imagining Damien and Alpha wrapped around each other. "We should try leapfrogging first. You're going to be weighed down, so it should be easy for me to overtake you."

Damien held his arms out. June carried Alpha over and Alpha wrapped his arms over Damien's shoulders. Damien gripped his arms under Alpha's legs and chest, then started running. It certainly wasn't the worst feeling in the world carrying a cute guy like this: the weight of his body under Damien's arms, the warmth of his breath against Damien's face, the heavy beating of his heart against Damien's chest.

Come to think of it, that last one was actually worrisome. "Alpha, are you OK? You're heart's going like crazy."

"Which one?"

What. "How many sodding heartbeats could I be talking about?"

June ran past with Shanjik.

Alpha took a hand off of Damien's shoulder. He pointed to the left side of his chest, said "1," then pointed to the right side of his chest and said "2."

Two hearts.

Unbelievable. Vulcan mind melding, Damien had gotten used to. Shapeshifting, Damien had gotten used to. A brother and a sister being genetically identical, Damien had gotten used to. All of this alien-ness in a package that didn't look the slightest bit different from _Homo Sapiens_ , Damien had gotten used to.

And yet two hearts, how the hell had Damien's brain judged _that_ as the line of biological strangeness to never be crossed? "Good to know, I guess your," he paused, "hearts-beat is basically normal, then." Or possibly "hearts-beats are," Damien wasn't really sure which to go with. "Is that something changes when you regenerate or something stays the same?" Damien realised the question was pointless as soon as he got it out; how was Alpha supposed to know one way or the other?

Alpha started crying on Damien's shoulder.

Shit. How was Damien supposed to handle this? "OK, um, whatever I just said, do you want to smack me in the face for it? Would that help?"

Alpha shook his head. He curled up closer into Damien's chest.

Damien couldn't believe he was about to ask this, but "Do you want me to call the Captain back? She's a lot better with the sensitive, touchy-feely – "

Alpha shook his head again. He wiped his face on Damien's shirt. "Could you tell me something about yourself?"

OK. "Well, I love how random that question felt, for one thing. My friends don't always like it when I say random shit to amuse myself, so I always like it when somebody else does the same thing." Damien wondered where this was going. "Is that a good start?"

Alpha looked into Damien's eyes. "Random shit to amuse myself." Half of a smile came over Alpha's face.

Damien laughed. "You should smile more. It looks good on you." He saw the Captain disappear around a corner. "What about you?"

Alpha wiped his eyes again. "I write a lot of poetry."

"Sorry to hear that." Damien wanted to punch himself in the face. He settled for cursing in a language he hoped Alpha wouldn't understand. "Yeah, so if I could rephrase the first thing I said, my friends don't always like it when I'm a righteous arsehole. Does that sound closer?" Damien rounded the corner and caught sight of the Captain again.

Alpha sniffed a bit. "It's OK, I've heard worse."

Crap. "No, Alpha, that is exactly the opposite of OK. That was the first personal thing you risked opening up about, and I'm sorry I fucked it up for you like that." How exactly did Alpha see him as boyfriend material after this? "I'm sorry I'm not personally a fan of poetry, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with poetry itself, and I'm sure Nathan or Arachne would love to hear what you've come up with. Maybe even the Captain if you're comfortable getting past a bit of sociopathery. You think you might want to share with any of them later?"

Alpha looked off to the side, then nodded. "Yeah, OK. Do you want to go again?"

"I love games. Not just games you hit a ball around a field, games you have to use your brain to keep track of all the actions the different rules say you can do at different times and which actions would work the best for you. Boards, cards, story-telling, do you know of any games like that?"

Alpha nodded. "Yea, sometimes when I was forced to mind-meld with other people, we would try to cram in a bit of imaginary gaming before we got caught."

Damien shuddered to imagine what probably happened after getting caught. "I hope I'm not being rude again, but might I ask where all of this is coming from?"

Alpha started crying again. "Just trying to cram an entire relationship into five minutes."

Damien stopped in his tracks. "What the hell do you need to do that for?"

Alpha looked into Damien's eyes again. "I don't want to die."

What was he talking about? Had something changed and the escape wouldn't work?

"I mean, I remember the other me promising he was still me, and I get the _logic_ of how we're technically the same person. I just keep _feeling_ like I'm going to die and turn into somebody else when," he paused, " _it_ happens." He wiped his face. "And what if I stop it from happening? If I see what would make me regenerate but get myself out of the way, then I can't get close to the me that's already down here, and I can't help anybody get out." Alpha crushed his arms into a death grip around Damien. "What if I screw everything up, what if I get everybody caught or killed, because I got too scared to regenerate even though I _know_ that it will still be me after it's done?"

Oh. Well then. How was Damien supposed to help with this?

"I thought that if I started doing as much as possible of something that I know the other me likes, then I could ease myself into becoming him more gradually so it wouldn't feel like dying, and the only thing I know about the next me is that I fall in love with you, so I thought that getting to know you more would be something to hold on to."

Damien looked at the tear-stained face of the man looking back at him. The man who'd never had a chance to live any other life than to be born in Hell, to live all of his 60 years in Hell, and to be led by some ungodly series of accidents to feel Damien was the only way he wouldn't shortly die in Hell.

If Damien could've wished in that moment to have been the one born here and Alpha been the one born free, he realised he would've done so in a heartbeat. Even after all of the kisses and all of the nights and all of the "I love you"s he'd shared with his previous boyfriends and girlfriends, he could not think of a single time he had ever felt this consumed by the need to protect a single one of them to the lengths he know wanted to protect Alpha.

His own eyes started to burn with tears. He'd always looked at "love at first sight" as a fantasy that destroyed people's lives, always been careful about taking relationships slowly so that he and his lovers wouldn't hurt each other with unpleasant surprises, but now he wanted nothing more than to give his entire life to the man crying in his arms.

Damien felt everything around him stop. As proud of himself as he'd always been of his patience in relationships, he'd always been equally ashamed he would overthink every option he faced to the point he lost all of his options. He realised he'd never made the connection before, but there it was: the "patience" he'd been so proud of was just another way he would paralyse himself when something good might have been right in front of him.

And now Alpha was hurting himself in exactly the same way. Maybe both of them needed to try acting on impulse to stop themselves over-thinking everything. "OK, I'm not going to let go of you, but I need you to stand up for a second." He kept his hand under Alpha's back as he lowered Alpha's legs. When Alpha's feet touched the ground, Damien wrapped his free arm around Alpha's back.

Then he wrapped his lips around Alpha's lips.

Damien closed his eyes, not caring whether or not Alpha did the same. Right now, all he wanted was for Alpha to feel one perfect moment of safety; to have something to drown out – even for just a second – the years of pain and horror bouncing around in the beautiful brain behind his beautiful face.

Damien pulled back. He looked Alpha in the eye, putting a hand on Alpha's cheek to dry the tears. "And?"

Alpha shook his head and cried more. "And it still feels like even if we do start dating before I turn into him, that you're still just humoring a dead man while you wait for the next guy," "And I _know_ that I'm being wrong about all this and that you're being completely amazing and that I'm just shitting all over you for it and I _hate_ that I can't stop myself." He buried his face in Damien's chest. "I don't know what's wrong with me, Damien. I don't know what's wrong with me."

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

Damien put his hand over the back of Alpha's head, hating he couldn't seem to do anything better. He lost control of his own tears.

Nathan and Arachne were always the ones who knew how to comfort others, not Damien. Hell, even the bloody Captain was better than he was at making people feel better, at least when she didn't want them tortured to death. Why couldn't Damien be more like them right now?

Maybe he should try something else. "How quickly can you mind-meld?"

Alpha looked up. "What?"

Damien dried his own face, then Alpha's again. "If I wanted to show you several hours of movies I've loved, would that take seconds in the real world? Minutes? How much do I have time to show you?"

Alpha shook his head. "Kathryn told me that I told her that I'm not allowed to mind-meld with you until after we're done."

Seriously? "I was going to show you series where the same characters were played by different actors for different movies. I thought it would give you something to hold on to the idea that different versions of the same person could still be thought of as the same person."

Alpha sniffed. "Would talking about them do the same thing?"

Damien shook his head. "I don't see how, the point was kind of supposed to be the visuals. It'd be one thing to _say_ 'my 5 favorite versions of Garasa are such-and-such and what's-his-name' or 'what's-his-face was a better James Bond than so-and-so' or – " Damien trailed off. "Huh, I don't think I ever noticed how many of these characters are secret agents from spy movies." Damien counted on his hands. "Garasa, James Bond, Kalyervt, Taska Venkman, Jorn Tega, Portu, Jack Ryan –" He gave up trying to list the rest he could think of. "Wow. That really is a lot of super-spies."

Alpha tilted his head to the side like a lizard. "You didn't already know that?"

Damien forced himself to grin. He hoped it looked convincing. "No, see, I knew there were secret agents on the list, I even knew there were specific fan-theories revolving around the secret-agent-ness of the characters: some fans claim the different actors are actually playing different spies that have been given the same code-name, other fans claim the characters were the same, but the different actors represented plastic surgery a character would get when their face had become too famous." Damien laughed. No forced attempts this time, this laughter was genuine.

"What's so funny?"

Damien looked back at the real-life Time Lord held inside his arms. "I just remembered the third option a lot of people talk about in time-travel societies like Nathan, Arachne, and the Captain are from: the characters are Time Lords who regenerate when they get –"

Damien's heart almost stopped when he realised he'd almost said "killed."

No way that could possibly go well. "Injured in the line of duty." Damien couldn't help imagine the looks on those fanboys' and fangirls' if they'd ever found out their mythical Time Lords had been created in the real world. "How did I not realise I would end up talking to a real-life Time Lord about fictional maybe-Time Lords?"

He forced himself to get back to the point. "So yeah, I didn't forget there were characters I could think of were spies, I forgot there _weren't_ characters I could think of _weren't_ spies."

Alpha stared off to the side. His face was still covered in tears, but he didn't seem to be making more. "OK, thanks. Maybe after this, Kathryn and I should add spy-movies to our list of marathons?"

Oh fuck. Damien had completely forgotten Alpha had a sister with 60 years history of love and support between the two of them. Why the hell was he trying to make _himself_ the thing to get Alpha through the hardest part of his already-hard life? "You know what, forget everything I just said. I don't know anything about Time Lords, I don't know anything about regeneration, and I don't even know anything about you – except you self-sabotage in exactly the same ways I do – so there's no reason anything I said should be expected to make you feel more comfortable about regenerating.

Alpha mouthed, "Wait, what?"

"If I tried to logic with you more about how regeneration isn't going to kill you, that shouldn't make you feel better, you've already tried the same logic I would. If I tried to promise personally regeneration isn't going to kill you, that shouldn't make you feel better either, I don't know anything about regeneration." Damien resisted the urge to point out the next Alpha's promise could be interpreted as a new guy tricking the first guy into killing himself with promises of them being the same person. "What about your sister? The one person was with you 60 years ago, has been with you ever since, and is still with you now. What does she say?"

Alpha started to smile. "She said it's still going to be me."

Damien pulled Alpha close again, resting his head against Alpha's shoulder.

He felt Alpha do the same.

"Don't worry about trusting me, don't worry about trusting yourself, don't even worry about trusting your future self. Do you trust your sister?"

Alpha nodded. "With my life." He started crying all over again.

Damien did too. Each wiped their faces on the other's shirt. "She says you're going to be OK. You're going to be OK."

Damien saw Shanjik and the Captain over Alpha's shoulder, standing in the distance.

He cursed in 4 languages. How much time had they spent just standing there making Shanjik and the Captain wait for them? "OK, we need to get to going now." He knelt back down to reach his arm against the back of Alpha's legs.

Alpha leaned back to let Damien lift him up.

Damien started running again. He yelled to Shanjik and the Captain, "Sorry for the wait, guys."

The Captain held her hands out. "Hey, we're all good. You guys feeling better?"

Shanjik leaned closer to the Captain. She lifted him up and ran alongside Damien.

Damien looked at the man cradled in his arms.

Alpha nodded.

Damien looked over to the Captain. "Yeah, we're good here. Sorry if we scared you."

The Captain laughed. "No worries. This guy smelled that you were crying, but that neither of you were injured, so we thought we'd give you a minute." She ran off ahead.

Alpha started mumbling, "Agent, spy, agent, spy, agent, spy." He nudged against Damien. "Hey, do you know any other words that mean the same thing?"

Damien couldn't wait to find out what this was for. "Let's see: watcher, scout, spook, plant, operative, detective, investigator, sleuth, observer, is that good start?"

Alpha rolled his eyes from side to side. He spun his pointer finger through the air in front of him. "You know what, no, I think I like the first one best. Agent. Agent, agent, agent, agent, agent." He looked up at Damien again. "Could you try calling me 'The Agent' so I can see what it sounds like in other people?"

Damien felt his face warm with joy. "Beta" had just found the perfect name for herself mere minutes ago, and now this man might end up taking a name too. "Sure thing, Agent. Do you want me to call you 'The Agent' a bunch of times or just once?"

Alpha – no, not "Alpha," "The Agent" – pulled himself up and kissed Damien's cheek. "I love it."

Damien didn't think he'd ever seen anything as beautiful as the tear-stained smile on The Agent's face. He would've given anything just to kiss that smile right then and there.

"SHIT!"

Captain June Harper sounded scared.

The halls filled with the whistle of rapid-fire plasma blasters.

Damien briefly wondered if that should be his hint to surrender.

He rounded a corner. Shanjik and the Captain were huddled against one of the walls some distance ahead. Shanjik was injecting something into the Captain's arm. She fired around the next corner with her free hand. She recoiled as a kaleidoscope of plasma rounds flew out against her.

Damien set The Agent down. "Sorry you have to crawl across the shaking floors, but you do not want to be part of this." Damien ran over to Shanjik and the Captain. He swung Ganymede into his hand from behind his back. "Captain, what's that?"

The Captain fired one of her blasters around the corner. The arm Shanjik had injected was burned. "Security team. Maybe a dozen soldiers." She waved her blaster in the air in front of him with her good arm. "Think you can hit this?"

Didn't sound good. Damien only pulled of a Venkman about 20% of the time in target practice, and his earlier attempt that day had taken him up to 0 out of 9 for actual combat. "Maybe I should throw it and you should shoot?"

The Captain shook her head. "Nope, sorry, drug for the burn hasn't kicked in yet. Don't think I can hit something small like that."

Damien took a breath. "OK, fine, but I'm not making any promises."

The Captain smiled. She fired her blaster at the wall across from her.

"Shan, what are you doing, jik?"

The Captain looked at Shanjik. "You ever heard of the Taska Venkman movies?"

Shanjik shook his head.

The Captain grinned at him. "Well that's too bad, because the first one created a stunt that inspired a thousand generations of real-life military instructors." She held the blaster up to his face. "You just take a small plasma weapon that overheats if you fire too quickly," she laughed, "And then you fire it too quickly." She shot the wall a few more times, then threw the blaster around the corner.

A barrage of plasma rounds erupted from down the hallway.

Damien aimed Ganymede at the dangerously overheated and potentially – hopefully – explosive blaster flying before him. He fired and jumped further from the corner.

An explosion ripped through the air.

The Captain laughed at the top of her voice. Damien almost joined her. This was turning into the greatest day of his –

More rounds burned through the air.

Damien stared at the wall. "Are you shitting me?" He glanced around the corner. None of the soldiers were injured. Clearly they had a one-way force field up.

Wasn't that just perfect. The first real-combat Venkman Damien had pulled off in his life, and it didn't do a damned thing. How the hell was that supposed to be fair?

The Agent crawled over to the rest of the group. He sat against the wall opposite Shanjik and the Captain. "June, you almost better?"

The Captain looked at the burn on her arm. She rubbed it with her good hand, then shook her head. "Technically, yes, but I don't know how we get past these people. I don't like that feeling." She looked back and forth amongst the motley crew gathered around her. "Anybody remember anywhere behind us where we could've made a wrong turn? I'm pretty sure we're going to need to backtrack."

The Agent stared at the Captain with his jaw down. He looked back at Damien and mouthed "What?"

Damien shook his head. "Agent, do you have another idea?"

Shanjik's and the Captain's faces jerked in synch to Damien.

Damien rolled his eyes. "We started talking about spy movies somehow, he decided he wanted to call himself 'The Agent.' I think it sounds good."

Shanjik smiled and nodded. "Shan, I like it, jik."

The Captain licked her lips, probably imagining the various super-spies The Agent named himself after. "Alright, _Agent_ , Damien seems to think that you seem to think that we should try to keep going forward. Care to fill us in?" She covered her mouth and laughed under her breath.

Unbelievable.

The Agent looked at the Captain, then back at Damien. He stood up, holding his hands against the wall to steady himself against the shaking of the floor. "Kiss for good luck before I explain my plan?" He walked over and wrapped his arms around Damien's neck.

Damien felt himself smile. He'd never been fond of snogging in the middle of a firefight, but The Agent seemed to be sure they were safe. "Sure, why not?" He closed his eyes and leaned in.

The Agent's lips pressed against his own. Damien pressed back and ran his tongue over The Agent's delicious teeth. He felt The Agent try not to laugh.

The Agent pulled away.

Damien opened his eyes, noticing a tear under The Agent's eye. "Are you OK? Well, relative to the circumstances?"

The Agent wiped his eye and nodded. "Yeah, I'm OK. First, you close your eyes again."

Damien did so.

The Agent's voice cracked. "Now, I run fast."

The Captain yelled, "What the fuck?"

Damien's eyes burst open.

The Agent was already around the corner. Unarmed, unarmored, and in full view of the firing squad.

Damien's heart ripped in half. "AGENT!"

Plasma rounds flew out, filled the space around The Agent. One shot hit him square in the face. His scream could've ripped the paneling off the walls. More fire peppered his centre-mass. He fell forward, smashing his face against the ground. The tremors of the explosions topside battered the lifeless body up and down and back and forth across the floor. Somehow, despite all of this abuse, The Agent's arms and head remained pointing towards the men and women murdered him.

Damien's legs collapsed under him. A load of vomit forced it's way out of his stomach.

He wanted to drown in it.

No, he wanted to drown the Agent's murderers in it. He wanted to rip them to pieces – no, set them on fire, maybe bury them alive – for everything they had done to the man, done to his sister, done to everybody else who had ever fallen prey to their madness. He wanted to get his hands on enough nanogenes – not Arachne's crappy Martian-model nanogenes, the Chula versions he'd heard rumours could resurrect the dead – first to save The Agent, then to kill every one of the monsters here a dozen times each.

He threw up again as he realised this was what the Captain probably felt like all the time.

Speak of the devil. Damien felt the Captain wrap an arm around him, then use the other to hold his head against her shoulder.

"Shan, am I the only one who remembers what happens next, jik?"

Damien looked at Shanjik over the Captain's shoulder. He tried to stare the bugger to death. "What the fuck are you talking about, 'what happens ne – ' OH." His arms went limp.

Was this what everybody had been talking about?

He looked down the hall to the broken, mangled body of the man he'd fallen so hard for just minutes ago.

The Agent was glowing. Just barely at first, but the light grew bright enough to be recognizable as yellowish in colour.

Damien forced his hand to tap the Captain on the back of her head. Did he dare to hope – ?

The light from The Agent burned brighter, almost drowning out his own form.

Damien heard various overlapping questions and/or curses from the soldiers behind the force field.

Jets of sizzling yellow plasma shot out from The Agent's body, careening through the air on a collision course with the firing squad. The streams crashed into a facedown dome-shape surrounding the shooters. The force field crackled in sparks of blues and whites against the impact.

More plasma rounds shot out from behind the cloud of yellow around the force field. One hit The Agent, but the jets shooting out of him only intensified. Another shot hit him. The jets intensified again.

A scream ripped out of The Agent. It sounded almost like The Agent's voice; Damien could tell it wasn't exactly the same, but couldn't tell exactly what the difference was.

The scream shifted slightly. Damien realised where he'd heard another voice this one was becoming more like: snogging him without explanation, claiming to be Alpha / The Agent from the future, leading everybody out of the infirmary to the hangar with Arachne.

Damien lost all track of the Captain embracing him.

The Agent was alive.

Damien couldn't imagine what he'd thought he'd been talking about with The Agent the whole time. Had he thought The Agent would do something voluntary? Had he thought it would happen at a certain time? How the hell had he forgotten regeneration meant The Agent would get battered to within an centimetre of his life and then come right back?

The Agent's voice shifted the rest of the way to that of his second body.

Tears burst out of Damien's eyes even harder than they had been. His mouth and lungs started hyperventilating.

Damien couldn't tell whether he was laughing or crying. He didn't care enough to ask. All he cared about was The Agent was going to survive.

Sparks of blue and white exploded in all directions. The plasma cloud blasted against the soldiers as the force field disintegrated. Damien could barely tell one noise from another amongst the cacophony of soldiers screaming, of weapons falling to the ground, and of booted feet running for their lives.

The plasma disappeared from around The Agent. The cloud assaulting the enemy fire-team followed suit within seconds.

They were nowhere to be seen. All that remained was a trail of firearms left short-circuiting on the floor.

Damien felt himself run to where The Agent lay. Was The Agent still conscious? Would he remember what had just happened?

The Agent's outstretched arms pulled closer to the rest of his body.

Damien knelt down and put his arms under The Agent's shoulders. He pulled The Agent up, cherishing the pressure on his shoulders from The Agent's face. He tried to put his hand across the bald skin of The Agent's head.

The Agent's thick new hair caught Damien off-guard. He hadn't paid enough attention to notice The Agent wasn't bald anymore when The Agent had been on the ground, but this was definitely the hair of the man ambush-snogged Damien the first time.

The Agent lifted his head. He yelped.

Damien held The Agent tighter. "Agent? Agent, are you OK?"

The Agent's chin dug into Damien's shoulder. The Agent's throat made several vowel sounds as he dragged his chin from side to side.

Damien lowered his hand to the side of The Agent's neck. "Agent? Can you hear me? What happened?"

The Agent nodded. "I bit my tongue." He laughed. "My new teeth bit my new tongue."

Damien couldn't imagine a more beautiful sound than The Agent laughing. He pressed the side of his face against the side of The Agent's, then turned to kiss the line where The Agent's new hair started.

The Agent pulled away. Now he was face-to-face with Damien, wearing the most beautiful smile Damien had ever seen.

The Agent put a hand on Damien's cheek. "Thank you." Tears ran down his face all over again. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Damien put his hand over The Agent's. He pushed The Agent's fingers to the side to dry his own tears, then guided The Agent's hand over his own mouth to kiss him again. Damien wanted to spend every second of the rest of his life kissing the wonderful man wrapped around him.

Damien felt a vise crush his heart. This wasn't going to work.

After everything was over with the breakout, Damien had to go back with Nathan and Arachne to help keep the Captain under control. How could he ask The Agent to come with him on a life of baby-sitting a serial killer, knowing that a single misstep means people die horribly? Hadn't The Agent been through enough traumas to last a thousand lifetimes?

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. "Agent, I just realized –"

The Agent put his finger to Damien's lips. "Shhh, we can worry about that later." He let his finger drop, then closed his eyes and leaned in closer to Damien's face.

Damien wanted nothing more than to "worry about that later," but how could he with everything it would take for this whirlwind not to explode in their faces when the novelty wore off and reality came crashing down around them?

He closed his eyes anyway, promising himself at least he'd try. For the Agent's sake, if not necessarily his own.

The Agent's lips pressed against his own again. These lips were softer than his previous, not as dry.

Damien thought back to what The Agent had said some time prior, "Trying to cram an entire relationship into five minutes." Could Damien be the kind of person to make that work? He and The Agent had so little time left before the escape was finished and they went their separate ways: Damien, with the Captain; The Agent, literally anywhere else in the universe for all Damien cared, even Mondas or Skaro might be better than living with the Captain.

Could he get through enough of a relationship The Agent wouldn't be let down at the end?

The Agent pulled away.

Damien opened his eyes. He put a hand on The Agent's soft, perfect face.

The Agent looked over Damien's shoulder. "Shanjik, if I didn't say this, you'd be asking if I can still feel the timelines around me?"

Shanjik didn't answer at first. "Uh, yes."

So the bugger really could talk like a normal person when he wanted to. Damien felt his brain start churning in all directions: before he'd heard Shanjik talk without re-introducing himself, the introduction custom had annoyed him all to Hell; and yet every time Shanjik spoke without doing so, Damien felt more and more that Shanjik shouldn't be engaging in speech his culture clearly disapproved of so strongly.

Would Damien cursing – at least in his head – every time he heard Shanjik curse make Damien more comfortable with this, remind Damien that nobody in the universe avoided _every_ little thing their respective cultures considered vulgar?

The Agent's actual question caught up with Damien's brain. "Wait a minute, did you guys just say 'feel timelines'?"

The Agent grinned at him. "Yes, yes we did." He looked over Damien's shoulder again. "Captain, would you mind shooting," he held one arm around Damien's neck and pointed around the hall with his free hand, "There, there, there, there, and there?"

The Captain's blasters buzzed to life. Apparently her arm had healed well enough to fire two. "All right, Agent, is this next explanation going to be as scary as the last one?"

The Agent sniffed.

Damien put his finger to The Agent's lip. Worked for him when The Agent did the same first. "Shhh, don't worry about just now, we're OK. You have anything else?"

The Agent kissed Damien's finger, then nodded. "Yeah, yeah, sorry. I just wanted the Captain to be able to share her thoughts without any unfriendlies seeing or hearing us."

What.

The Captain sighed behind Damien. "Wow, you're good. Damien, you listening?"

Damien nodded. This sounded intriguing.

"OK, so remember that ambush in Round 1 where Al – The Agent – tells me and Skeerse to stand in the open as though we don't know there are enemies on the other side of the door?"

Of course Damien did, he'd been baffled by the whole thing before The Second Agent had explained the counter-trap.

"Well, we were just on the receiving end of exactly the same thing. Shanjik smelled a dozen troops around the corner that he _thought_ were relaxed because they didn't know about us getting closer to them. I tried to catch them by surprise, but every single one of them fired the second I ran around the corner. Force field or no force field, part of their relaxation had to be that they were being told where we were."

Wow. "So this is exchange right here is how The Agent knew about the cameras to warn you about?"

The Agent smiled. "Actually, I'm thinking that that one might also be me seeing possible futures of us getting ambushed in the moment, but yeah, this whole thing just now probably helped."

"Shan, so a few minutes from now, they'll fall for exactly the same trap they'd just set for us, jik?"

The Agent shrugged. "I don't know, maybe some of the groups aren't coordinating as well as they could be? All I know is that it worked last time."

The Captain clapped her "Everybody focus" clap. "OK, Shanjik, anybody else we need to worry about right now?"

Damien snapped back to attention. How long had he and The Agent spent dilly-dallying around this time?

"Shan, two groups of about a dozen each are converging, but we have enough time not to get cornered, jik."

Damien kissed The Agent's forehead, then stood up.

The Agent's face smacked into Damien's gut. Damien looked down and saw The Agent struggling on the floor.

How had Damien forgotten how much the floor was still shaking? He knelt down to help The Agent to his feet. "Need help getting your new legs to work?"

The Agent looked up. "Maybe a little bit?"

Damien wrapped his arms under The Agent's shoulders.

The Agent kissed Damien's cheek. "Nope! Just wanted you to hold me again." He kissed Damien's other cheek, then grinned and ran off into the hallway. Not as steady on his feet as he would've been were the floor steadier under his feet, but certainly steadier on his feet than he had been a few minutes ago.

A hand rubbed the back of Damien's shoulder. Mammalian: the Captain, not Shanjik. "Damien, you ready to get moving? Shanjik says we got another two dozen of these bastards to clear out before your boyfriend can come back here with the rest of us."

Damien nodded. He wanted nothing more than to run back to The Agent so they could hold each other in complete, conscious, deliberate ignorance of the ugliness in the world around them.

Barring that, he wanted to think as long and as hard as possible about how he would break the news to The Agent they wouldn't be together after this was over: maybe he could start by reminding The Agent the Captain was a serial killer, maybe he could do something to break The Agent's heart – shouldn't be too hard, Damien excelled at being an arse to people cared about him – maybe he could …

But none of this would matter if The Agent and the other escapees get attacked en route to Arachne. The Captain was right; The Agent would need a clear path.

Damien drew Ganymede back into his hands. The Captain picked Shanjik back up, and Damien ran after them.

He mentally went over the rest The Agent's part of the escape: The Agent catches up with Damien's past self on the way to the infirmary. They make out, or rather The Agent makes out with him, then reunite with everybody else. The Agent introduces himself, tells his past self and their sister they name themselves "Kathryn" and "The Agent" – explaining the spy-movie and _Star Trek_ inspirations – then he and his past self alternately mind-meld with their sister to explain as much of the plan as possible before filling in everybody else out loud. The Agent leads everybody out from the infirmary – through the ambush that he counters by telling Skeerse and June to act under-prepared – to rendezvous with the newer versions of June, Damien, and Shanjik and lead everybody to Arachne.

Just like last time.


	12. Chapter 12: Kyra & June

**And here it is! After 2 more months of writing than I'd thought that I would need, here are the final 16,000 words of my first complete novel-length story. I'd had no idea when I started writing that this story would grow to 63,000 words (my initial estimate had been closer to 40k), let alone that this one chapter would be longer than my first 4 chapters combined, but all of those extra words happened and I have finally finished writing them.**

 **This grand finale resisted all of my attempts to break the text into multiple** _ **chapters**_ **without interrupting the narrative tension, but I was able to split this into 4 sub-chapters with the breaks marked off to make it easier for anybody to find their place if they need to take a break and come back to this later.**

 **Enjoy!**

Kyra could feel the Judoon commander – Yorta – trying not to cry in front of his lieutenants.

The technician, another Judoon named Corx, had made the testimonial procedure sound so clinical. Commander Yorta and half a dozen lieutenants and sub-lieutenants would take Kyra and Skeerse to a brain-scanning station. Kyra and Skeerse would then lie down inside two of the scanners, their memories would be uploaded to the Shadow Proclamation's computers, and anything not directly related to the crimes in question would be deleted. Finally, Yorta and his officers would lie down to experience the same memories, toned down enough to avoid overwhelming them but not enough to lose important details.

Kyra's impression, both from Corx and from the officers, had been that this was routine for them. She'd been promised that, over the course of their careers, every one of the officers with her had experienced dozens of crimes from the perspectives of all sorts of criminals, victims, and/or bystanders. She'd been promised that they'd been trained to handle the psychological toll of re-living others' memories of violence, and she'd been promised that even if an officer started to feel overwhelmed, Corx would then administer an emotional tranquilizer to make the officer comfortable enough to keep going.

Now none of the officers were holding up as well as everybody had thought they would.

Granted, none of them had broken quickly. Each of the officers had re-lived individual crimes before that had been worse than any one experiment done to Kyra, worse than any one experiment that Kyra had seen or heard about being done to any of the other captives with her. Even most of the murders that Kyra had been forced to watch had been merciful compared to some of the murders that the officers had experienced.

However, none of the officers had ever experienced 5 years worth of constant torture and murder in a single session before.

Even if the computers were operating at full speed, this would still have been worse than anything the officers had been trained for. The fact that the battle outside was taking up so much of the ship's computer power meant that the memory download was drawn out even longer than it was supposed to be.

Sub-Lieutenants Tun and Cor, the two newest in the group of officers, had broken first, each a little before the 1-month mark of the download: Tun when he'd gotten to one of the times when Kyra had been electrocuted for failing a test of her psychic ability, Cor when she'd gotten to one of the times when Kyra had been forced to watch a Time Lord being executed – in this case, drowned – in a failed attempt at triggering regeneration.

Sub-Lieutenant Tun had also been the first officer to receive a second dose in the same session: Kyra being infected with a flesh-eating virus about a year and a half in as a test of a new anti-viral serum.

Lieutenant Kah had held out the longest without tranquilizers, but she'd broken about two and a half years in when a Dalek ship had been captured and psychic prisoners had been forced to read the crew, either from a distance like Kyra or from a personal connection like The Agent, Kathryn – back when they were "TL-13-Alpha" and "TL-13-Beta" – and the other Time Lords.

The whole time Kyra had felt the officers re-living her captivity, she had wished there were something she could do to comfort them beyond simply waiting for Corx to administer the tranquilizers. She wished they could stop the procedure then and there, or at least fast-forward to the part where Captain June Harper and her crew had been sent by Allah to end the cruelty.

But no: from what she'd read of Corx's and the officers' minds so far, Judoon felt the same pain from broken rules and procedures that Malmooth felt from rudeness and isolation, or that Humans felt from injury and death. If Kyra tried to force Corx to stop the download before everything was finished – or even tried to do it by herself – then she'd just be hurting the officers even worse than her memories were hurting them now.

She wished she'd known ahead of time that the procedure wasn't designed for experiences like hers, or at least not at times like this. She could've suggested that the testimonial process be saved until after the battle so that the computers would be unimpeded. Or, if her information were crucial to the battle itself, then she could've suggested that the ship return to the Time Vortex for the same reason, re-joining the battle after the Judoon had all of the information they needed.

At very least, she could've insisted that Skeerse be scanned instead of her. The procedure wasn't designed for his experiences under these circumstances either, and his four years of being forced to torture others against his will would certainly not have been easy for the Judoon to re-live either. But it would still have been easier than Kyra's five years of being tortured herself. Not only would they have been done by now, but the officers could also have gone longer before needing any doses of tranquilizer.

Now they were a little over four years into the download, and Commander Yorta was about to get his second dose. He had first broken a little more than one year into the experience: Kathryn, back when she was "Beta," had tried to organize an escape with two of the doctors; they'd gotten caught; Kyra had been forced to feel the doctors being incinerated, then to mind-meld with Beta to pass along the agony that the doctors had endured as they died. Now Yorta was at one of the times that Kyra had been taunted with several soldiers' fantasies of torturing her purely for recreation.

This left Lieutenant Jing as the only officer left who'd only needed to be dosed once. Her breaking point had been about two years in when Kyra's hand was amputated without anesthetic for testing a new healing procedure.

Corx checked the time, praying to his gods that the procedure would not take much longer. It had already taken a little more than seven minutes to get through the first four years of Kyra's experience, meaning it would take almost another two minutes to get through the last year.

Neither Corx nor Kyra found much comfort in that estimate. Sure, the officers weren't experiencing the memories in real-time, so they wouldn't feel afterwards that it had taken the entire five years to get through for themselves. Still, Kyra couldn't imagine that they would feel it had only taken about nine minutes.

And then they would have to go through Skeerse's memories after all of that.

Kyra lost all feeling in her legs. Would a new plan really hurt the Judoon officers worse than having to go through all of this a second time? "Corx, they don't need to go through Skeerse's memories after this is over, do they? Aren't mine enough?"

Skeerse paled when he realized the same thing that Kyra had. She hadn't even known his species could do that.

Corx shook his head. He'd already completed a binding schedule that the officers would receive Skeerse's memories as soon as Kyra's were finished. The officers would receive a one-minute break to catch their bearings, but that was all.

Skeerse jumped in before Corx could say that out loud. "Well are there rules in place that say when this procedure would need to be put on hold? Maybe there's a time limit, or perhaps you've used too much tranquilizer in one sitting, or too much computer processing?"

Corx wished that the fleet used the contingencies that Skeerse had listed, but to his knowledge they did not. He shook his head again.

Skeerse resisted the urge to compare Corx to the criminals who'd created the horrifying memories in the first place. "OK, then maybe the massive artillery battle outside means that these people would be more valuable elsewhere?"

Kyra asked Allah to let Corx go along with this suggestion.

Corx certainly wanted to do something, but Skeerse's specific solution seemed incredibly dangerous to him, dangerous in the same way that Kyra or Skeerse would see a plan as incredibly dangerous if Corx had suggested risking somebody else's life for the sake of the officers.

Kyra tried to make the idea more Judoon-friendly. "Maybe you should focus on the fact that the memory scans were already a change of plans that interrupted the officers' normal duties? Putting the second download on hold would be _removing_ the change of plans rather than adding one."

Corx appreciated the thought, but didn't feel that he had the authority to make that decision.

Kyra felt her hands reach to pull an imaginary tuft of hair out of her bare scalp. "Then who _does_ have that authority?"

Corx started to suggest that they wait to ask the Commander himself whether the second session should be put on hold.

A Judoon voice came through the computer. "Corx, do you copy?"

Corx recognized it as a Lieutenant Commander Ket. "Yes, Ma'am."

"I have decided that the witnesses are correct; we have risked enough by removing Commander Yorta from the chain of command for this long. I am sending an officer to relieve him."

Just him? What about the others?

At least Ket's quick answer meant that she was listening in. Kyra wouldn't need to worry about asking Corx to relay questions for her. "Excuse me, Ma'am, why not the rest of the officers?"

"If their abilities to carry out other duties have been compromised, then we cannot risk compromising other officers in the same way. We will tend to them when the battle is over."

Skeerse's mind again compared the Judoon leadership to that of the facility they were supposed to be fighting against; supposed to be better than. Kyra was tempted to agree with him.

Still, Ket's reasoning did make this sound like the least bad option. At least, it would be from the perspectives of the officers experiencing the download; not Kyra's or Skeerse's perspectives, but they weren't the ones enduring this, the Judoon officers were.

In any case, it sounded like Ket was already bending a few rules just to make this much happen. If she was the kind of person who was willing to bend rules for the greater good, then she was the kind of person who considered exactly how far the rules could be bent and how far they could not; at least Kyra hoped she was.

Did Kyra – who, despite her psychic exposure, still only had about a half hour's experience with Judoon psychology – truly have the right to expect that Ket would go even further than this? No, Ket was the one who understood where all of the specific rules had come from; Kyra would just have to trust her judgment. Maybe she'd been allowed to question the Judoon's procedures, but that didn't mean she was allowed to reject the answer she'd been given. She whispered, "Alhamdulillah."

Skeerse didn't share Kyra's acceptance. Even if she couldn't hear the derogations churning through his brain against the Lieutenant, she would still have noticed that his tail was jittering like crazy behind him.

She walked over and put a hand on his back. "It's better than if they weren't helping anybody. Let's be thankful they're risking this much."

Skeerse cursed at Kyra in his mind for calling the Lieutenant Commander's decision a "risk."

He immediately apologized for lashing out at her when she wasn't the person he was angry with.

Kyra asked Allah to help her make Skeerse understand. "Skeerse, when you had personal time at the base, did you only spend it with Humans and other – " What was Skeerse's species called again? "Carscanglians, or were you close to people of other species?"

Skeerse hadn't actually spent much of his personal time with anybody. He'd always find some isolated corner of a room, lie back against the walls, and escape into the world of his own mind.

Kyra could use that. "If Shanjik did the same thing, would you think there was something wrong with him?"

Skeerse realized where Kyra was going with this: yes, from what he'd been told, the social instinct in Shanjik's species was even stronger than their survival instinct, and clearly Kyra was trying to make the same point about the Judoon's organizational instinct.

Kyra nodded.

She remembered Corx seeing that the download would take less than two more minutes. That had to have been at least a minute ago, maybe it would help Skeerse to know that the first download was almost over. "Corx, how much time is left?"

Corx checked again. "20 or 30 seconds."

Skeerse tensed all over again at the reminder of how soon the second download would start.

Kyra wished she could take her question back.

A Judoon officer outside – Sub-Lieutenant Ko – approached the testimony room to relieve Commander Yorta.

Kyra fought the urge to run and open the door for her. She focused her attention back to Skeerse. "Look, I'm sorry I brought that up. Can we just focus on how your experience won't be as bad for them as mine was?"

Ko opened the door and walked in. She first looked to her right, said, "At ease, Petty Officer Corx," then she turned to her left. "You are Kyra Sylvan and Doctor Skeerse?"

Kyra nodded. She felt Skeerse do the same.

"The Shadow Proclamation thanks you for your cooperation in this matter. You have my condolences."

Kyra felt Corx's surprise at the Sub-Lieutenant for adding that last part.

Corx's computer rang the signal that the download was complete. Kyra felt Commander Yorta and the Lieutenants snap back to the present. Each had been marginally aware of the world around them during the memory download, but it was still disorienting for them to come back completely.

Sub-Lieutenant Ko stood at attention. "Commander Yorta. Under Section 5506, I hereby relieve you to your duties on the bridge."

Yorta struggled to climb out of the scanner bed.

Kyra asked, "Do you need a hand?"

He felt that he did not, but he thanked her for asking anyway. He dug his knuckle into his eye so the pain would sharpen his senses, then he rolled his legs out of the bed and stood up.

As his thinking cleared, he realized – with Kathryn and The Agent's deep familial love, Damien and the rest of the crew's deep companionate love, and with Damien and The Agent's fledgling romantic love – there was a strong chance that Captain June Harper could convince the Time Lords to join her crew instead of going with the authorities.

Kathryn and The Agent might not be treated as victims for much longer. They might soon become fugitives.

Kyra couldn't tell whether her heart was beating too hard or not at all. Ko was already climbing onto the scanner bed. Kyra decided to try getting a quicker psychic answer from Ko in person, rather than trying first to get a slower, spoken answer from Ket over the computers. "Sub-Lieutenant Ko, do you know if Captain Harper and her crew have escaped yet?"

Last thing the Sub-Lieutenant had heard about them, Arachne was maintaining air support against the base's defenses. June and Damien were presumed to still be inside, fighting their way back out.

Kyra hoped that was still right. "Commander Yorta, is there anyway that we can contact Arachne?"

He doubted that. Every time he had run into the Captain's crew, Arachne had resisted his experts' attempts at opening communications with her, either for negotiating with her and/or overpowering her with secret computer viruses.

Kyra tried to ignore the mind-control implications of trying to hack into Arachne's brain. "But she is at least listening?"

Most likely. The Judoon's system of wormhole-communications was supposed to be impenetrable, and yet all of the Shadow Proclamation's – admittedly limited – records on Captain June Harper showed that Arachne was more capable of evading law enforcement than should have been possible if she had simply been guessing their tactics.

Good. One the whole, it was unfortunate that Captain June Harper had escaped justice for years of sadistic murders, but in this moment, it meant that Kyra could make Arachne talk to the Shadow Proclamation for the first time. "Could we broadcast that Kyra Sylvan would like to speak with the ship of Darico Cava?"

Everybody in the room wondered who "Darico Cava" was.

Which meant that the computers had automatically deleted that memory from Kyra's upload.

No time to get into that now. Kyra braced herself for Yorta's imminent surprise. "That was Captain June Harper's name before she joined the Time Agency."

Yorta almost passed out. The adrenaline from his almost heart attack kept him awake.

The Time Agency was infamously efficient at destroying any records of their agent's old lives, and Arachne had been equally efficient at destroying the Agency's records of their rogue agent's brief service. The Time Agency and the Shadow Proclamation, both through separate efforts and through joint task forces, had since devoted trillions of officer-hours and googabytes of computing to the search for any information that might have escaped destruction. How had this girl learned June Harper's real name in just a few hours?

Kyra pointed tapped her head. "Psychic, remember? June still thinks about her old life from before the Time Agency."

Yorta forced himself out of his shock. Kyra was right: Shadow Proclamation knowledge of this information might be enough to make Arachne risk opening a connection to the Judoon ships. He asked if Kyra knew Arachne well enough to join him on the bridge and help draft a message to entice her.

"I would be happy to." Kyra turned to Skeerse. "Are you coming with us?"

Skeerse asked who "us" were and where they would be going.

Kyra couldn't believe she'd started taking psychic communication for granted so quickly. "With Commander Yorta and I to the bridge. We're hoping to make sure that Arachne sends the Time Lords with us instead of letting June recruit them."

Skeerse hadn't considered that risk either. He wondered if Shanjik was in the same danger.

Kyra shook her head. "No, he's not as attached to the others as The Agent is to Damien. Shanjik will probably leave them without issue."

Skeerse decided against going. This was a matter of person-to-person communication; he never felt he'd been good at that. He shook his head and took a breath. "No, I don't think I'd be very useful."

Lieutenant Commander Ket spoke again through the computer. "Commander, our intra-ship teleportation is back online. Are you well enough to be taken directly to the bridge?"

Yorta gave a quick once-over to his current health and function. He couldn't find any pressing issues. "I am. Kyra?"

Kyra felt all right. "Let's go."

Her body tingled as the room around her changed into the bridge of the ship.

A Judoon officer – the Lieutenant Commander Ket from the earlier conversation – stood at attention. "Commander Yorta, we have drafted a message to broadcast, sir." The last version of the message that she had seen was "Kyra Sylvan would like to speak with the ship of Darico Cava."

Kyra had assumed that her quick summary would be expanded for the actual message, but both Yorta and Ket seemed confidant that this short version would suffice. She saluted Yorta, hoping she wasn't making any serious errors in the Judoon custom. "Thank you, Commander."

Yorta noticed that Kyra had turned her hand in the wrong direction, but felt that this was minor enough to let go. "Broadcast the message."

Petty Officer Tho sent the message to the other ships. This was the first time in his career as a communications officer that he had ever done so with the hope that a fugitive would be listening, rather than the hope that one wouldn't be.

Tho's computer showed a signal coming from Arachne.

Tho couldn't make himself say the words.

The wormholes that Judoon ships communicated through were supposed to be unbreakable, Arachne had broken in to them, and now she was sending a response. One which, for all they knew, contained the same sorts of computer viruses that the Judoon had tried countless times to overpower her with.

Yorta wondered why the Petty Officer wasn't giving an update, be it positive a negative. "Is the _Morningstar_ responding, Petty Officer Tho?"

Kyra hoped that it wouldn't hurt them too much if she answered for him. "Yes, Commander, she is. He just can't wrap his head around how she could possibly be doing that."

Neither could the rest of the bridge when Kyra said that. Initial discomfort at Kyra answering for the Petty Officer was quickly overshadowed by the bewilderment that their wormhole-communiqués could be intercepted.

Yorta snapped out of speechlessness first. "Petty Officer Tho, does the _Morningstar_ 's message appear to be infected?"

Tho started analyzing the signal. It appeared to be a request for an open channel of communication rather than a self-contained message, but he couldn't force himself to say so.

Kyra felt that the other Judoon had handled it well enough the first time she'd answered for him. She decided to try it again. "She wants to open a channel so that she can talk to us directly, sir."

The officers again felt uncomfortable that Kyra had answered for the Petty Officer, but again they felt more uncomfortable with what she'd said. If they opened a channel to connect with the _Morningstar_ directly, then she could send whatever viruses she wanted, and the fleet's computers would not be able to scan her messages quickly enough to protect themselves.

Kyra didn't think that this scenario was as worrying as the officers were making it out to be.

Still, Kyra had only known the crew for a few hours. She may have discovered specific pieces of information that the authorities had missed, but that didn't necessarily mean that she knew the bigger picture as well as the others did. "Commander Yorta, sir?"

"Yes, Kyra?"

"To your knowledge of June Harper and her crew, is Arachne more ruthless than the Captain or less?"

Everybody on the bridge who had heard of the _Morningstar_ crew felt that the ship was far less ruthless than the Captain, not more. The Captain killed others the second that she judged them to be villains unworthy of life, but the _Morningstar_ tried to avoid lethal force against the same offenders for as long as possible. The Captain took great pleasure in killing, but the _Morningstar_ took no such pleasure. The Captain went out of her way to make her kills as torturous as possible without sacrificing efficiency, but whenever the _Morningstar_ was forced to kill a person who was threatening another, she always tried to do so as cleanly and mercifully as possible.

Yorta decided that the _Morningstar_ could be trusted. She would eventually need to be charged with and sentenced for aiding and abetting a serial killer, but she was not one herself. "Petty Officer Tho, open a channel with the other ship."

Tho managed to force out a quiet, "Yes, sir." He accepted Arachne's request for computer access.

Arachne's voice came through Tho's computer. "Kyra?"

Kyra hadn't thought this far ahead. How was she supposed to start the conversation? "Arachne, what are you going to do when all of this is over?"

"My friends and I will get out of here as soon as we can, but first we'll need to talk to The Agent about whether he wants to come with us or not."

Kyra's legs almost buckled under her. Why would Arachne let The Agent make that decision for himself? "But why would you let him do that? Having a crush on Damien doesn't justify letting him live on the run with a serial killer!"

"It's not just him and Damien. When I mind-melded with Kathryn, I showed her that Nathan and I have a plan to rehabilitate Captain Harper."

Rehabilitation? Was that possible for a serial killer?

Arachne continued, "I couldn't go into a lot of detail, but she knows how sure I am that it will work, and she wants to help."

Kyra looked around the Judoon officers gathered on the bridge. "Is it possible to do that?"

Most of the officers agreed that it was possible, but not likely. Both the Time Agency and the Shadow Proclamation had found thousands of witnesses who'd unwittingly interacted with Captain June Harper when she was not in the middle of a murder spree. Analysis of her behavior in their memories had always shown that she genuinely enjoyed their company, shown that she recognized them as people in their own right and not as resources for her own use, and shown that they had been perfectly safe from the cruelties of her mind.

Captain June Harper's brain was biologically aroused by murder – both in fantasy and in action – to a degree that no healthy brain would have been, but clearly she was not _controlled_ by this biological defect in any way. She was in complete control of her homicidal urges, and she would never kill anyone for the pleasure itself, she would only kill if she was certain that the person in question was going to kill somebody else if she didn't kill him first. Every time the Captain tortured someone to death, it was because she believed that she was fighting against evil to make the universe a better place for innocent people to live without fear of being hurt themselves.

De-programming a murderer driven by ideology was nowhere near as straightforward as medicating a murderer driven by neurology. If a lunatic were medicated against her will, freed from the impulses that had been beyond her control, and if she could then look back on her actions from a place of sanity, then she would want to continue treatment so as not to revert to the person she had been previously.

A zealot on the other hand, one such as Captain June Harper, would actively resist any attempts by her "enemies" to "brainwash" her into abandoning her "righteous" crusade against evil.

More importantly, the criminal in question would need to be kept under absolute control during the course of her treatment. The _Morningstar_ , on the other hand, had left hundreds of mangled corpses in her wake. Whatever she and her crew thought they were doing to keep their Captain under control, clearly their plan had failed.

Kyra couldn't see any way for Arachne to not already know all of this. How could she think that her plan to control Captain Harper was working? "Thank you everybody. Arachne, what makes you think you can rehabilitate Captain Harper more effectively than professionals could?"

"She sees me as a fellow rule-breaker. She doesn't shut me out the way she would a doctor appointed by the authorities."

That was not even close to answering the question that Kyra had asked. "Thank you for telling me why your plan _might_ work, but can you tell me whether it _is_ working or not?"

"It hasn't worked yet, but I know that we are getting closer to a breakthrough."

"And how many more people have to die before you decide that you've sunk too much cost into your gamble?"

Yorta told Kyra that the Time Agency and Shadow Proclamation had tried repeatedly to turn the _Morningstar_ and her crew against their Captain with the same negotiations that Kyra was trying now, but that negotiation had always failed. Yorta wanted to believe as hard as Kyra did that the Captain's friends would come to their senses someday and surrender themselves and their Captain to the authorities.

Right now, however, Kyra's focus should be on trying to save Shanjik and the Time Lords from being forced down the same path. No reason to make the same mistake with the Captain's crew – trying to reason with the unreasonable – that the crew were making with the Captain herself.

Kyra decided Yorta was right. Kathryn and The Agent had to be the priority. "Arachne, are the Time Lords with you?"

"Just Kathryn. We're trying to get my teleports back online so I can evac' the team that's still planet-side."

"And when that's done?"

"Kathryn will psychically share the rehabilitation plan with Shanjik and I'll share it with The Agent. We'll ask if either of them want to help us, but if The Agent doesn't want in, then Kathryn will stay with him instead of coming with us."

How could Arachne say that? Her brain was far more powerful than Kathryn's or The Agent's, more powerful than the combined brains of thousands, possibly even millions of Time Lords. If Kyra had only ever been exposed to her captors these past few years, not to the other prisoners – or, on second thought, to the sadists who didn't care about their comrades' super-soldier research – then the sheer force of their conviction would probably have even convinced Kyra that her own suffering was a necessary sacrifice.

Did Arachne really think that the Kathryn and The Agent would be making their final decisions freely, rather than being overwhelmed by Arachne's force of personality? "Have you emphasized what happens if the plan doesn't work?"

"I know it will."

"But you _can't_ –" Kyra froze, mouth still open.

Arachne was a time machine. This entire escape had revolved around time travellers coming from the future to give the best possible information to their own past selves.

Kyra prayed for the strength to ask her next question. "Arachne, are you saying you've already seen June Harper rehabilitated?"

Arachne answered, "That's classified."

Two of the Judoon fainted. Most of the other officers fell mentally silent.

Yorta started trying to work out what it meant if Kyra was right about Arachne's plan. For all of their careers, they'd both heard rumors that many "unsolved" cases had actually been solved and that many "uncaught" culprits had actually been caught, just in ways that required the majority of law enforcement personnel to believe otherwise.

Ket didn't share the same enthusiasm for conspiracy theory. If she was assigned to bring in one criminal and other officers were assigned to bring in other, then she would bring in her criminal and the other officers would bring in their. If any of the other arrests were kept secret from her, then it wasn't her place to know about them, and she didn't bother wasting time wondering about hypotheticals. To the best of Ket's knowledge, Captain June Harper would never be officially brought into custody; therefor Ket would not be bringing her into custody. Why should she care whether the reason was "nobody will ever arrest June Harper" versus "somebody else will secretly arrest June Harper"?

Yorta, on the other hand, had always enjoyed spending his free time studying unsolved cases and "uncaught" culprits, coming up with ideas for how some of the cases might have secretly been solved, how some of the culprits might have secretly been caught, and why such victories were required to be kept secret from the majority of law enforcement.

Now most powerful accomplice of Captain June Harper, number 7 on the Shadow Proclamation's list of Most Notorious "Identified, But Never Arrested," had claimed that the Captain might be one of law enforcement's secret victories.

Yorta's mind churned with possibilities. Would the Captain's allies set her up to be arrested, the arrest kept secret, and the Captain rehabilitated in an asylum? Would her allies rehabilitate her, convince her to turn herself in, and her surrender would be kept secret? Would she go into self-imposed exile to protect the world from her own homicidal urges? Would she continue her outlaw campaign of vigilante "justice," but without the bloodlust that had traumatized so many crime scene investigators?

Or was the _Morningstar_ lying, letting the present authorities trick themselves into letting the Captain escape to continue her crime spree until she got herself killed?

Kyra's mind went in a different direction. If Arachne's plan was based on a time loop where a future June Harper would give instructions for redeeming per past self, then the plan depended on the different parts of the plan not changing as everybody cycled through the loop of events.

That would be easy enough if it were just Arachne and her friends. Even Arachne's temporal technology wasn't powerful enough to alter timelines to any serious degree, so a trio of humans couldn't possibly derail the plan that Allah had already established for redeeming June.

But perhaps the Time Lords could.

Every cruelty that the military and scientific personnel had come up with had been done to create super-soldiers capable of fighting the Daleks, and the core focus of their research had been the finding power to change the timeline as easily as the Daleks could.

The Time Lords that had been created before Kathryn and The Agent had not been able to change timelines as well as the researches had hoped, but neither had they been able to regenerate from life-threatening injuries. The Agent was the first time that the researchers had gotten regeneration to work, and presumably his identical twin would have the same power. Could they also be the first time that the researchers had gotten the power of changing timelines to work?

The Agent hadn't changed anything between the two halves of the current escape plan, but that didn't mean that he and his sister couldn't change part of the June Harper rehabilitation plan.

Now Kyra had another reason why the Time Lords shouldn't be allowed to stay with June. "Arachne, if your plan involves what I think it is, then shouldn't you keep the Time Lords as far away from it as possible?"

"Actually, it would be a lot harder without them."

Harder? "You _need_ them?"

"Not 100%. If The Agent doesn't like the plan, then he and Kathryn can leave and I'll just try to find someone else to do their part. It'll just take a lot longer and there'll be a lot more casualties in the meantime."

What did Arachne mean "their part"? "Wait a minute, are you saying that you knew about them before you came here?"

"I wasn't here specifically to look for them, but yes, I already knew about them, and every time my friends and I found a facility like this one, I'd always look for Time Lords."

So her crew would've worked to free the other captives even if Kathryn and The Agent hadn't been among them. Kyra hadn't even noticed that she was asking herself that question, but she still recognized her relief that it had been answered.

In any case, it didn't look like the Time Lords would be free for much longer. Kyra had gone into this conversation committed to saving them from going with June Harper; now even she was starting to feel that it might be their duty to go with, that Allah had organized their creation specifically to save June from herself. How could The Agent possibly resist the same idea, even if Kathryn weren't already on board with it?

Kyra forced herself to breathe. "Arachne, could you at least tell them I said good-bye?"

"Would you like to tell them? Kathryn and I have the teleports working again."

Kyra looked around the Judoon officers. "Would you trust me to come back?"

Yorta did. He'd just re-lived 5 years of Kyra's life, so he felt confident that Kyra was not the kind of anarchic person to run off with a serial killer, no matter how strongly the Captain and her crew tried to persuade her that they could handle murderers better than law enforcement could.

However, Chief Petty Officer Vo – the technician overseeing teleportation to and from the ship – worried more about the logistics than about Kyra's character. The Judoon couldn't teleport Kyra over to the _Morningstar_ because their computers were too preoccupied for the precision required, but the _Morningstar_ couldn't lock onto Kyra without the Judoon letting her scan their bridge.

The only solution Vo could think of was for the Judoon to teleport Kyra from the ship into some patch of air for the _Morningstar_ to scan, then for the _Morningstar_ to teleport Kyra from the air into herself. Vo couldn't imagine that even the _Morningstar_ could manage such a stunt.

Clearly he didn't know Arachne's crew as well as Kyra did. Captain June Harper had done this with Arachne dozens of times.

Then again, Arachne was probably busier now than she had been any of those other times. "Arachne, if they teleport me into the open sky, would you be able to catch me?"

"Yes."

Vo grumbled in his mind about how this wasn't what he signed up for. He turned to the subordinate beside him. "Petty Officer Mir, find the safest place to teleport Kyra, then send the coordinates to Petty Officer Tho's station. Tho, send the data to the _Morningstar_ when you receive it."

Mir looked for the two Judoon ships that appeared to be taking the least enemy fire, then scanned a position somewhere between the two. She sent the coordinates to Tho, and he sent them to the _Morningstar_.

Arachne answered almost instantly. "Message received. Everybody ready?"

Kyra answered, "I am." She didn't hear any objections from the officers. "Let's do this."

The room transformed into Hell.

The floor fell out from under Kyra's feet. Her stomach wrenched as the emptiness below grabbed her and dragged her down. The wind roared across her ears as she plummeted, joining the cacophony of rockets and cannons and explosions. Her vision flooded with the blaze of hovering warships bombarding the ground facility with cannon-fire and vice versa. The air reeked of metal buckling and burning against the barrages, of Arachne's engines choking the sky with radioactive exhaust. Even the most distant explosions battered Kyra's body from the inside out.

Kyra tried covering her eyes, her nose, and her ears. Nothing she did could drown out the force of the destruction before her.

The barrage against her senses petered out. Kyra's feet settled on solid ground.

She opened her eyes; she was inside Arachne again, second story.

Kyra dropped to the floor and vomited.

Nathan asked if Kyra needed some water.

Kyra hadn't realized that he would be awake again. "Yes, please."

Nathan walked over and knelt down to pick Kyra off the floor. He handed her a thermos of ice water.

Kyra took a sip. It didn't settle her insides completely, but it certainly helped.

Kathryn was working on a section of wall off to Kyra's left.

Kyra jolted in surprise.

She hadn't noticed she was there. She'd never been able to _understand_ Time Lords' minds, not unless one was melding with somebody other than another Time Lord, but at least she'd always noticed when one was present. Had double-teleporting messed up her power's range?

She would have to ask about that later. "Is anybody else here?"

Nathan told her that they had got The Agent back first; he was mind melding with Arachne on the second storey – what Kyra would've called the third story – to see if he liked the rehabilitation that Arachne was planning for Harper. Shanjik had come after him, and now Kathryn and Arachne were trying to get a lock on Damien. Harper was the strongest, so she was being saved for last.

"Thank you." Kyra looked over to the Time Lord. "Kathryn? Are you busy?"

Kathryn looked into the exposed wiring in the wall. "Arachne, are you good for now?"

"Yes Kathryn, go."

Kathryn ran over and knelt down to hug Nathan and Kyra.

Kyra's eyes stung with saltwater. When she had first seen that "Alpha" and "Beta" were out of their cells because of Captain June Harper, Kyra had assumed that they were being freed. It hadn't once occurred to her that the Time Lords would be trading one environment of murder for another. She prayed that Kathryn and The Agent wouldn't be put through too much worse than they already had been.

Nathan asked if Kyra wanted him to leave her and Kathryn alone for their good-bye.

Kyra nodded. "Kathryn, could you let Nathan go?"

Kathryn relaxed her arm. Nathan got up, stopping himself from remembering details of the rehabilitation plan as he left.

Kathryn embraced Kyra again. "Do you want to come with us?"

Kyra's stomach wrenched all over again. "Kathryn, I can't. I hope this works, I really do." She shook her head. "I just can't be part of it."

"Because you don't want to, or because you think somebody's stopping you?"

How could she ask that? "Why would that matter? If I _wanted_ to be involved with a serial killer, then that would mean that somebody needed to stop me."

Kathryn recoiled.

Shit. Kyra didn't need to read Kathryn's mind to realize that she'd probably taken that personally. "That's not what I meant, you _need_ to be here to stop her. That's different."

"You don't think you can help?"

Kyra jerked her head around. Damien was standing not 20 feet away, but she couldn't hear his mind.

She would need to talk to Arachne later. "When did you get back?"

"Just a few seconds ago."

Kyra let go of Kathryn and stood up. "I think that you, Nathan, and Arachne all think that you're helping, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's working for you. I just can't make the same mistake you are."

"What would you do differently?" Damien's thought's slipped out as he walked closer. In the year he'd travelled with the Captain, he'd heard dozens of people call him and his friends out on protecting her, but he'd always come to the conclusion the crew's current arrangement was the least bad option.

A lot of people had told him every victim of the Captain was his and his friends' failure to stop her. Damien had felt that way at first, but even legitimate law enforcement agencies couldn't save everybody from murderers with the Captain's dedication.

Others had told him he and the crew should appoint someone other than her as their leader so she would have to ask permission to kill anybody. Those people hadn't met the Captain themselves. Everybody who did recognized neither Nathan nor Damien nor Arachne had the force of personality to coerce the Captain directly.

Kyra wanted to believe him. More for Kathryn and The Agent's sakes than for Damien's own, he'd already made his choices, but she did. "Did you ever have plans to turn her in if all of this failed?"

People had suggested that too. Damien feared this was giving the authorities too much credit; the Captain was strong enough and persuasive enough she'd just escape custody whenever she wanted. Without a team of handlers to occupy her time, she'd just go out and find new friends. With her force of personality, it wouldn't take long for her to gather a following of vigilantes who shared her passion for bloodshed and destruction.

This had always been the deal-breaker whenever Damien found himself wondering if Nathan and Arachne's rehabilitation plan was unrealistic. Even if they couldn't stop the Captain herself from being a serial killer, they could still distract her from building an army of serial killers, one with the potential to inflict thousands of times the damage the Captain could inflict on her own.

Kyra hadn't thought of that. She'd been horrified enough at the idea of June as a lone wolf serial killer, but now Damien was showing how easy it would be for June to start a massive terrorist movement. Were her friends really better at keeping her under better control than Kyra had thought they were? Should she be thinking of them as "successfully stopping a terrorist leader" rather than "unsuccessfully stopping a serial killer"?

No, Kyra couldn't accept that. Damien's explanations made sense in his own mind, but he'd had about a year to rationalize the life he'd chosen. How was she supposed to trust that he wasn't lying to himself? "And what if you're wrong?"

Damien asked if Kyra didn't think his logic made sense.

" _Anybody's_ logic would make sense if they've been doing something long enough! How many villains can you think of who would say 'I've already started, it's too late for me to stop'?"

Which Damien felt brought them back to the original question: what did Kyra think they _should_ do if the current arrangement wasn't working?

"I don't know, and you've had an entire year to think about this! Why haven't you tried coming up with backup plans instead of settling for just this one?" Kyra realized that she was saying the exact same thing about Damien that Shanjik had already tried saying about himself.

She grabbed her forehead with one hand. "Oh, crap." Did this mean that she was supposed to be letting Shanjik judge himself as harshly as she was judging Damien, or did this mean that she was supposed to be judging Damien as leniently as she'd wanted Shanjik to judge himself?

Damien asked what Kyra's problem was. He caught himself and rephrased his question to ask what was bothering her.

Kyra shook her head. "I just lost the point I was trying to get at."

In the sense she forgot where she was going?

"No, I remember exactly what I was saying. It's just that I'd said the exact opposite thing to somebody else today, and I don't know which one I was wrong about."

Damien hated that feeling too. Sure, he loved arguing as many sides as possible regardless of which side he agreed with, but he still didn't like finding out he didn't know what he believed as well as he thought he did.

Still, he found it was very common for two contradictory ideas to fit together better than they looked at first. He asked if it was possible Kyra had been right both times.

Kyra didn't think so. "Shanjik felt guilty for not trying to resist the murderers he worked for, only I told him it wasn't his fault, and now I'm saying it _is_ your fault for doing the same with June."

Damien hadn't made that connection.

"Is the difference that Shanjik is my friend but you and I just met? I don't see how that could make me come across any better."

Damien wondered if her brain was making a distinction between how Shanjik had to be forced to serve the murderers versus how Damien served the Captain voluntarily.

Phrasing it that way made Damien wonder if maybe Kyra did have a point; but, again, him and his friends helping the Captain was still far less destructive than them not helping her.

On the other hand, how many people like Shanjik and Skeerse and worked at the super-soldier facility for exactly that reason?

Now Damien was wondering if Kyra could be right he, Nathan, and Arachne were lying to themselves. Had they rationalised their service to a serial killer for so long they weren't judging themselves objectively anymore?

Kathryn looked at Damien over Kyra's shoulder. "Are you OK?"

Damien wasn't any more sure than Kyra had been a second ago. He'd always felt the most disgusting villains were those who knew what they were doing was wrong, who bragged about how much they hated what they were doing, but who insisted "it's too late for me to stop doing it." Was he on his way to becoming the same kind of person? One who supported a serial killer not because he thought he could control her, but because he didn't remember how to live any other way? "No, I really don't think so."

Kathryn looked back and forth between Kyra and Damien. "Why, what happened?"

"Oh, nothing serious. Kyra just made me wonder if the driving force behind the last year of my life has been a vicious lie." Damien meant that as a joke, but he couldn't shake the feeling he might someday get to the point he really didn't see anything wrong with living around the Captain.

Kathryn started staring at the back of Kyra's head.

Kyra turned around the face her. "What is it?"

"Are you sure you don't want to help us?"

Not as sure as she was a minute ago, but yes, Kyra still felt sure that she couldn't help them. "Yes, why?"

"I think you just did."

What. "How so?"

Damien wondered if this was about Kyra making him less confident in the plan to rehabilitate the Captain. Damien had been completely committed to the plan, but a few sentences with Kyra had been enough to make him doubt himself. Maybe Kathryn thought Kyra should stay on board as the outsider less invested in the plan than everybody else was, more capable of looking at the plan objectively than they were, and uncomfortable enough with the plan she wouldn't let anybody else become comfortable?

Kathryn put a hand on Kyra's shoulder. "You just got Damien thinking that he might not want to be part of this anymore. Do you think you might be able to help the rest of us in the same way? Looking for problems that the rest of us don't notice because we like the plan more than you do?"

So Damien had been right.

Underneath his new cynicism about his own motives and judgment, Damien thought the idea sounded hilarious. The Captain had taken it upon herself to police the universe in the most bloodthirsty way imaginable, and the rest of the crew had taken it upon themselves to police the Captain as damage control. Now Kathryn was asking if Kyra wanted to come on board, not just to police the Captain directly, but also to police the way everybody else policed the Captain. "So who exactly would police Kyra if we do this?"

Kyra ignored that last part.

Could Kathryn and Damien be right? If Kyra went off with the authorities and left June's friends to work on the plan on their own, would that mean that – instead of Kyra protesting the problems in the plan – Kyra would be allowing the problems to go unchallenged?

No, that was exactly the same thing that Nathan, Damien, and Arachne had been telling themselves about June this whole time, but June was still killing whomever she wanted, however she wanted, whenever she wanted. But Damien had made a compelling case that they _were_ preventing more damage than it looked like they were. Had Allah brought Kyra here because He wanted her to do the same thing? Not to stop _all_ of June's violence, but to do more than simply leaving June to her own devices. But that was exactly how Shanjik's overlords had gotten good doctors to commit evil against their will, by insisting that the damage to the innocent prisoners would be worse if the doctors _didn't_ help the captors…

Kyra felt herself go dizzy from the back-and-forth in her head. When had coming to a decision ever been this hard for her?

 _Acting_ on her decisions had certainly be hard at different points in her life – converting to Islam and telling her fundamentalist Christian family on Earth about her conversion had been the two hardest – but making the decision itself had always been easy. Why didn't she know what to do now?

She asked Allah to show her the right thing to do, apologizing for having so much trouble finding for herself.

Damien noticed Kyra shaking her head in frustration. Or at least, what he thought was frustration, but he'd never been good with facial and/or body language. He asked Kyra if he was reading her correctly.

Kyra nodded. "Yes, yes I am frustrated. I know for a fact that one of my two options is absolutely evil, but not which one is which."

Damien made a snark in his mind about whether that meant both options were evil.

He reminded himself that line probably wasn't helping anything. He asked what Kyra normally did when a decision was this hard for her to make.

"I don't know. I've never had this much trouble." She turned to Kathryn. "Have you?"

Kathryn shook her head. "No, but I've always imagined I'd ask a friend for advice, so," She gave a thumbs up, "Good for you, I guess?"

Damien tried not to laugh at the image of Kathryn and Kyra asking each other infinitely, "I don't know, what would you do," "I don't know, what would you do?"

He forced himself to focus. He'd always believed, when faced with a few options and no idea which one was the best, people should take the more flexible option just in case they did find out at some later point which one was better. In this case, if Kyra went with the authorities now, but found out later she'd been supposed to help rehabilitate the Captain the whole time, she wouldn't be able to find Arachne and the rest of the crew later and she would fail her responsibility; whereas if she stayed with Arachne and the crew now, then found out later she wasn't supposed to be involved, they could always drop her off somewhere else before she got in too deep with them. Not a perfect option – if Kyra got entangled in crimes she wasn't supposed to, after leaving she would still have to either turn herself in or hide from the authorities the rest of her life – but better than taking the risk the Captain's bloodshed would go on longer without Kyra than it would with her.

Damien realized he'd just talked himself into thinking The Agent had to stay on board for the same reason. He'd heard Kyra mention Kathryn "needed" to be involved, he'd had no reason to believe her brother would run off without her, but he hadn't put it together until just now The Agent would be sticking around because she was too. Now the fact he was dreading The Agent's inevitable involvement made Damien feel maybe the idea wasn't as good as he'd made it out to be when he was defending it to Kyra.

Damien's legs went numb.

Kyra ran over to catch him. She got her arms under his shoulders just as he started falling.

He was a lot heavier than she would've guessed. Kyra didn't think she could lower him to the floor without losing her own balance. "Kathryn, could you give me a hand?"

Kathryn wrapped her arm under Damien's left shoulder from behind. She put his left arm over her own shoulders. "We helping him sit here or carrying him somewhere else?"

Kyra hadn't though of that. As she worked her way to Damien's right, she asked, "Arachne, would it be OK if Kathryn and I set him down against the wall?"

"Of course."

Carrying Damien 10 feet was harder than Kyra had thought, but she felt she and Kathryn managed well enough.

As they set Damien down, he apologized for almost fainting.

"It's OK, Damien, you're OK now."

Kathryn looked over. "Did he just say something?"

"He just wanted to apologize for making us carry him like that."

"What is he talking about? He didn't 'make us' do anything, we wanted to help him!"

Damien made himself say, "Actually, I was thinking about it the way she was."

Kathryn rolled her eyes and stepped back. She looked back and forth between Kyra sitting against the wall and Damien leaning against her. "Kyra, I really hate to keep going after everything else we've said, but I really think you're a good influence on us."

Kyra looked up. "Are you sure?"

"Damien's been working on this plan for about a year, and you made him question himself in a few sentences."

"Yeah, but you said that already. Don't you think he'll remember this next time?"

Kathryn shook her head. "That's exactly the problem. He couldn't have lost confidence that quickly unless he was already doubting the plan on some level, but he's never let that stop him until now."

Damien almost regained feeling in his legs. He lost it all over again. Had he not only missed potential signs the plan wasn't working, but been actively ignoring them?

Kathryn went on. "If he's had these doubts this whole time, but always been able to ignore them, then don't you think it might be easy for him to go back to ignoring them without you? Sure, me, him, and Arachne will remember this whole thing –"

Kyra felt confident she knew what Kathryn was getting at without being able to read her. "But you're afraid that if Damien has been able to ignore his worries about the plan before, then maybe the bunch of you will be able to keep ignoring them later?"

Kathryn nodded. "If it would really be a bad thing for us to grow comfortable with June Harper, then are you sure you wouldn't want to be the outsider who keeps us uncomfortable?"

Kyra was starting to like Damien's perspective on this: when two options look equally bad, take the one that you can get out of most easily. She looked at the ceiling. "Arachne, you keep track of your own time, right? Not just where and when you are in the universe, but how long you've been doing something?"

"Yes."

This sounded like a good start. "So if I asked for, say, one Earth week to live here before deciding whether to leave or not, would you know how much time I was talking about?"

"7 days or 10?"

10? Why would humanity switch to a calendar with 10-day weeks? "7. Do you need to pick an easier time frame to work from?"

"Actually, we use the Classical calendar too. All of my friends are all Humans, so their circadian rhythms line up nicely, and Nathan is extremely Christian about when he wants days set aside for just resting."

"Very well." Kyra hadn't thought it would be this easy to reach an agreement. "So one week then?"

"If that's what you want."

"Yes, it is."

Damien wondered if Shanjik and Skeerse would be coming too at the rate this crew was taking on new passengers.

Now that he mentioned it, Kyra felt that was a very reasonable question. "Arachne, is Shanjik staying?"

"Yes. It didn't look like any of you were treating your conversation as a secret, so I kept Shanjik up to date and he said yes for the same reason you did."

Damien realised it would also be a good thing to have a medic on board in case anybody got injured and couldn't be taken back to Arachne in time.

Kyra made a mental note to ask Shanjik if that had also been a factor. "And Skeerse?"

Arachne didn't answer for a couple of seconds. "If we call the Shadow Proclamation and ask for him so you can say good-bye, they'll only agree if they think they can set a trap while we're distracted. Would you like me to try anyway?"

Kyra thought about how offended Skeerse would be if they left quietly.

Kyra would've been offended in his position, but it occurred to her that the two of them had never been particularly close, and he had never struck her as caring much about niceties even with the people he did consider to be very close. Dragging out a long good-bye – one based on Kyra, Shanjik, and the two Time Lords going with a serial killer instead of with the authorities – would probably make the news harder for him, not easier, than hearing about it from somebody else with more distance. "Now that you mention it, I don't think it would be very important to him. Not enough for us to risk it." She turned back to Kathryn. "Were you and The Agent ever close to him?"

Kathryn shook her head. "No, we were just acquaintances, not actual friends. Once in a while, he and The Agent would get the chance to talk about boys, or he and I would get the chance to talk about escape plans, but there was never a lot more than that."

That settled it. "OK, Arachne, I think we'll be good with the way things are. When do you think we'll be able to get out of here?"

"I just need to get another lock on Captain Harper. As soon as we teleport her back, we can leave the compound for the authorities to deal with."

Kyra stood up. "Thank you." She walked away from the wall. Damien's thoughts – mostly about the new people joining the crew and what it might be like to live with them – disappeared when she got a few paces away from him. "Arachne, can I come back up to the sick-bay? I think my power's glitching again."

"Of course. Come on up."

Kyra walked to a ladder and started climbing. No need to use the elevator; Kyra was not going to let her body waste away again.

She wondered how quickly the others would get used to their new relationships. Shanjik and Arachne would have to learn to work together as medics, Arachne being more powerful but Shanjik being able to go to a patient while Arachne depended on the patient being taken to her. Kathryn and Nathan would have to learn to work together as engineers, although Nathan seemed more skilled at computers while Kathryn had been very quick to learn about the machines that the computers controlled. Damien and The Agent would have to learn whether they could grow their infatuation with each other into a true relationship without breaking each other's hearts further down the line. And of course, Kyra would have to keep to herself, to cast her herself as the outsider, to resist every urge in her heart, mind, and soul to connect with the others because she couldn't risk their judgment about Captain June Harper clouding her own.

She prayed for the strength to do the right thing: if her place was with June's crew, then the strength to support them and to aid them; if her place was not with them, then the strength to get out before it was too late for them or for herself.

At the very least, she asked that she be given enough time to figure out what she was supposed to do.

June looked around the corner. The sounds and tremors from outside had been growing louder and louder, harder and harder, as she'd navigated the building. Now the first hint of actual battle was visible through the door at the end of the next hallway.

Ari not being able to teleport June out yet – having to leave June alone with nobody to keep her company – had felt sour at first, but seeing the battle from this close would more than make up for it. No untrained civilians for June to worry about being traumatized, no patronising brothers or sister-in-arms to insist that nobody let themselves enjoy their life's work, just a beautiful soldier left alone to enjoy a beautiful battle.

June made a run for it. She kicked through the door and danced her way onto the rooftop.

She couldn't imagine a more perfect vista than the one before her: the moans of Ari's engines as she flew through the sky, snaking between the Judoon ships and caressing the empty air with the soft breath of her black holes; the thousands of plasma rounds tearing through the clouds in all directions, creating the most beautiful lightshow as the colours danced between the ships in the air and the facility on the ground; the pulsing of the pressure waves from the explosions, distant and nearby, as they massaged her entire body from the skin to the bone; the sweet aromas of the plasma rounds as they burned through air and force fields and masonry and metal.

If cannon-fire had incinerated her then and there, she would not have been disappointed. Withering away in a hospital bed, no matter how many friends and lovers she had surrounding her, could never measure up to the idea of dying surrounded by the spectacle around her right now.

About a dozen metal spheres whizzed past her, each about a metre across. They flew towards one of the Judoon ships, then fired sickly green beam weapons. The ship's defenses couldn't lock on to such small targets.

June wanted to laugh. Even the Rhino Patrol couldn't complain about her saving them from inanimate objects, could they?

She lowered the blaster rifle hanging from her shoulder and took a smaller blaster from around her waist. She fired the blaster at full-speed, not hitting any of the drones but not expecting that she would. Hitting a drone would've been nice, but the blaster itself was the point.

June's face flushed with the sweet perfume of the blaster over-heating. Every centimetre of her body tickled with anticipation, but she kept firing. These drones were further away than any Venkman she'd tried to pull off in her life. If she fired now, the blaster might cool off before it got close enough. The explosion wouldn't be powerful enough even if June was able to hit it perfectly.

The heat of the blaster's discharge spread to the handle. June gave herself one second to enjoy the warmth in her hand.

She threw the blaster into the air. One second went by. Then two. Then three. June drew the rifle again.

The blaster flew closer to the swarm of drones.

June aimed her rifle into the sky and fired at the blaster.

She missed. She fired again.

She missed again.

This had never happened before. Then again, she'd never tried from this much distance before. June fired a third time.

The rifle shot wrapped lovingly around the blaster. The joining exploded into dancing sparks and vapours of blue and white.

The two drones caught inside the explosion crashed against the Judoon ship before falling out of the sky. Another drone was pushed away from it's vantage point, scratching one of it's own allies with it's beam weapon as it tried to re-orient itself.

If Taska Venkman herself were transported to the real world, witnessed the master shot that June had pulled off in her name, and offered to share herself as a reward, June would still look back more fondly on the beauty of the shot itself. Maybe not much more, but a little bit.

"Nice shooting, Captain."

Was that Ari speaking from behind her?

"Are you ready to come back?"

That was her, all right. June looked over her shoulder to see where Ari's voice was coming from.

A charred, mangled, box lay next to the door June had run out of. Clearly there was a microphone and speaker somewhere in that mess of metal plates and wires. Had it been hanging above the door before the firefight? "I'm ready when you are, beautiful."

"Just few more seconds."

June turned to face forwards again. The surviving drones had broken off from the Judoon ship and were flying towards her, each far enough away that June couldn't hit more than one at a time with a Venkman.

Then again, she could easily shoot them down despite the distance between them. June's blood tickled as she imagined the looks on the drone operators' faces as they tried to attack her, only to see her charge at them with a plasma rifle blazing in each arm, jumping off the roof to get closer to the drones, and possibly getting teleported out before getting hit herself and/or falling to her death.

She realized that a mid-air evac might not work this time. Ari had never had trouble with moving-target teleports before, but June didn't think Ari had ever tried one in the middle of a battle this massive before, not with everything else happening her to keep track of.

June looked back to the mangled radio behind her. "Ari, if I jump of the roof, are you able to catch me?"

"Yes I am."

So Ari already had a teleport lock on June's body. Just to verify, she signed with her hand, "Can you tell what I'm saying?"

"Yes, I can."

This was going to be fantastic.

June hoped that the drones weren't automated, or at the very least that there were functioning cameras for the soldiers downstairs to watch what was happening. Personal pleasure aside, she didn't see much point in trying a stunt like this if it didn't scare the shit out of somebody.

June turned and hopped to the opposite side of the roof, taking great care to copy the speed and posture of somebody like Nathan or Damien trying to running as fast as they could. Granted, any officers still alive to watch her had probably already seen her running at her real speed, but maybe she could convince them that she was exhausted, or that she'd been using hidden equipment but ran out of fuel.

Hell, she might even get lucky enough to find an audience who hadn't seen her run at top speed yet.

June reached the edge of the roof. She was about 120 meters from the opposite edge, maybe 150. Shouldn't take more than five or six seconds to run back across at full speed.

She turned around and crouched down, aiming her rifle with both hands so that any hypothetical viewers might think that she couldn't fire accurately with one hand.

The drones drew closer to their home base. None of them were firing; they must not be accurate for long distance.

June was. She fired 3 shots at the nearest drone, then 3 more at another. Two shots hit the closer drone and sent it crashing to the ground, one more hit the further drone and knocked it a few metres off course.

She fired 3 more shots at the damaged drone, then 3 at another one. Each drone was hit directly and each one exploded.

This seemed like a good place for the climax of her performance.

June set the rifle in her hands to full-auto. She let it drop, savouring the pressure on her neck as the shoulder strap dug into her. She took the rifle from under her other shoulder, double-checking that it was already set to full-auto.

Pale green light shined in front of the nearest drone. The beam weapon must be charging.

June slipped out of both shoulder straps. She put one hand through each one, wrapped each around her arm, and took the rifles in her hands.

Green lights started glowing in front of the other drones.

June raced towards the swarm.

Beams of green burned through the air above her head. June ducked lower to the ground.

Her foot landed against the corner between the roof and open sky. She jumped into the sky.

The air massaged her and kissed her on every centimeter of her skin as it rushed past her. Her insides shivered as the gravity of the planet reached up and tried to take her for itself.

June hoped that flying felt as wonderful to Ari as it felt to her. If a deity ever revealed itself and offered June eternal life and youth, she would trade it in a heartbeat for the ability to fly.

The first of the drones soared past. Its beam swept across the sky as it tried to turn around.

June twisted in the air. She fired one of her rifles at the drone she'd just passed, her other at a drone further back.

Both drones exploded against the force of the plasma storms. June aimed her rifles at two more. These exploded just as quickly as the first two.

One of the energy beams drew too close for comfort. June focused both of her rifles on the drone shooting at her. The machine went down before the beam could connect.

The wind against her skin told June that she'd reached the peak of her flight and was starting to fall. She rolled her body around so her back would be to the ground.

The final drone's beam weapon pirouetted around her, sweeping closer one moment, over-shooting the next, then trying to re-orient but always missing.

Did that mean that the drone was being piloted remotely? The cannon was clearly not designed to hit such a small target from such a great distance, and any halfway decent auto-targeting program would've known better than to try its luck. The only explanation June could think of was that the drone was being controlled by a person on the ground, that June's feats of 51st century speed, strength, and hand-eye coordination had terrified this person beyond the capacity for rational thought, and that this person was instinctively trying to destroy the enemy at all costs instead of looking at the situation rationally. The ground operator couldn't possibly know that June would be able to survive a fall from this height, so the reasonable thing to do would've been to fly the drone away and let her fall to her death.

Could the pilot have realized that June would survive the fall and could continue firing from the ground? Now that she thought about it, that wouldn't actually have been unreasonable for the pilot to figure out after the jump that June had just made.

Still, the pilot hadn't seemed to realize that flying the drone for a closer shot would work better than trying to snipe like this. June was far closer to the drone right now than she had been for her Venkman barely a minute earlier, so the pilot should've realized that keeping the drone at an unusable distance would not protect it from June's own shooting.

She tried to decide which would be scarier: getting teleported out while the drone pilot was powerless to stop her from escaping, or destroying the drone first and leaving the pilot with no idea what would happen next.

She chose destroying the drone. If the pilot saw June teleport out, then the pilot would _know_ that June had teleported out, and knowing less was always scarier than knowing more. June wanted the drone's final visual transmission to be that she was plummeting to the ground, yet confidant that this wouldn't be the end of her.

The drone dove through the sky. The energy beam missed more narrowly than it had a few moments ago.

June grinned and licked her lips, hoping the drone's cameras would be able to make her face out from this distance. She aimed both rifles at the drone, waited a second for the pilot to process what was about to happen, then fired a barrage of plasma rounds.

The last of the drones exploded. June whooped at the thrill of the lightshow. The beam dissipated centimetres from the side of her waist.

The pilot's pants must be soaked by now.

This seemed to be as good a time as any to check back in with Ari. June let go of a rifle and signed "Pick me up?" with her now free hand.

The beautiful tingling of pre-teleportation buzzed across her body. She closed her eyes to focus on the feeling. In an instant, she went from laying on her back to standing on her feet. The bed of wind rushing against her disappeared.

June opened her eyes. She was inside Ari again.

Damien was sitting against Ari's hull, and it sounded like people were moving around upstairs.

June's face flushed with warmth as a smile danced across. She leaned her back against the wall and looked to the ceiling. "I missed you, Ari. I don't think I got to say that when we bolted out of here, but I really did miss you." She stopped herself from rubbing her hands across Ari's paneling.

"I missed you too. Are you OK?"

June laughed. As far as she could tell, everything was fine. Wouldn't Ari already know that from scanning her for the teleport? "Five by five, Ari. Is there anything else left for us here?"

"I just need to hang up on Yorta. Do you want to say anything first?"

Yorta? Was Ari talking about the Shadow Proclamation Judoon Commander Yorta that June had once shared a wonderful time with, only for him to chase her off the planet when he found out that she was a wanted vigilante? What was she talking with him for? "That depends, what have you said so far?"

"Kyra called from his ship asking for the Time Lords, so I teleported her over to talk in person."

June chastised herself for assuming the worst about one of her closest friends. "Was this a private conversation?"

"Kathryn said that she wanted to stay with us, Kyra tried to convince her and The Agent to go with the authorities, but Kathryn and Damien convinced her and Shanjik to stay."

June almost passed out from euphoria. "Oh my gods, Ari, did I hear you correctly?"

"Kyra, Shanjik, Kathryn, and The Agent will be leaving with us."

She covered her mouth with her hand and laughed. Or cried, she couldn't tell exactly which.

New people would be joining the family. For all the thousands of single-serving friends she'd met in her travels across the universe, she'd had to spend the last year and a half with only two or three personal friends – first Nathan and Arachne, then Damien – that she could trust with her life, that she could count on to be there for her, and that she could be there for in return.

Learning now that her family of vagabonds would be doubling in size, June wondered how she'd made it this long.

She could already feel the possibilities flooding her brain for the life that the new family could make together.

Damien and The Agent would obviously have the chance to turn their whirlwind-fling into a genuine romance. As far as June knew, they could be the first loving couple ever to live inside Arachne as a couple.

Arachne herself could team up with Shanjik and Kathryn for medical and mechanical work, freeing Nathan to regain his life's love of programming, to focus on tending to Arachne's psychological health while Kathryn tended to her physically, and freeing Arachne to travel wherever she liked without having to stop for mechanical check-ups. Nathan had always been the closest thing Arachne had to a mechanical engineer – June and Damien tried to pitch in, but they'd never been able to help in an actual crisis – but even with him trying to take care of her, Arachne had always needed to stop every few weeks to get professional work done.

Kyra was not a soldier, so she would never be expected to use her psychic powers for combat, but if she was as socially conscious as she seemed, then perhaps she might like to take point on the family's conflict mediation. She might not have the clinical training to be a real-life Deanna Troi, but that didn't mean she couldn't use her power to be the best concerned friend that she could be.

Kyra also hadn't shown any interest in June physically, but perhaps Shanjik or Kathryn might be more open to experimentation. Granted, June hadn't got that impression from either of them either, but neither she had met either of their species until today. Maybe she was missing a tell somewhere in their expressions and their body language?

June wanted to dance naked for joy. She hadn't known most of these people for even a day, but already she couldn't imagine going back to living without them. This was turning into the most wonderful day of her life.

She registered the fact that Ari hadn't used the name "Alpha." "So The Agent told you his new name when he got back?"

"We actually need to talk about that later."

Really? How could that be something important enough to merit its own talk?

Arachne continued, "Right now, do you want to tell Yorta anything before we leave?"

Oh, she most certainly did want to say something. "Would we be able to jump to the Vortex as soon as we're done, or would it take us longer?"

"We can jump whenever."

Perfect. "Count me down, then."

"5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go."

This was going to be fun. "Well if it isn't Commander Yorta! Do you still think about the nights that we spent together?" June certainly loved thinking about those nights whenever she got bored.

The Judoon's voice flooded out of Ari's speakers. "Captain June Harper, under the laws of the Shadow Proclamation and under the charter of the Time Agency, I hereby order you to surrender." June had thought Yorta would be more shaken, but he seemed to be maintaining his composure well enough.

She laughed. "Not going to happen, gorgeous!" Ever since the day that she and Nathan had met June for the first time, Ari had scoured the universe for the Shadow Proclamation's deepest, darkest databanks, and she'd always told June that the authorities never caught up with them. Was June supposed to believe that there was an arrest record somewhere in the universe and that Ari had been lying to her? No, that was never going to happen.

Still, no reason not to joke about the possibility a bit. June hoped Yorta would remember the ancient movies she'd gotten him to watch. "You can check your calendar if you think you'll want to remember this as the day that you caught me," she started to raise her voice in preparation for the climax, "but I can assure you that you'll always remember this as the day that you _almost_ caught," She took a deep breath, signing with her hand, "Get us out as soon as I say it."

Yorta interrupted the dramatic pause. "Darico Cava."

Impossible.

June's heart clenched in place.

Arachne interrupted next. "Is it OK that I hung up and we're leaving now?"

June nodded. She tried to say "Yes, that is absolutely OK," but her throat couldn't push the words out. She signed the words instead.

Yorta knew the name "Darico Cava." Where the hell did he get that name?

Arachne had gone to great lengths over the last year and a half to find any information relating to June's life as Darico Cava, and she had gone to even greater lengths to find ways of erasing that information from the rest of the universe's timeline without changing anything else.

Hell, Arachne had even outsmarted a Dalek patrol ship since June had come aboard. No civilisation known anywhere in the universe had time technology comparable to that of the Daleks, but Arachne had once maneuvered a Dalek scouting vessel into a supermassive black hole in a way that the Daleks on the ship could not travel back in time to stop from happening.

Arachne may have flown like hell out of the way of all other Dalek ships she'd encountered, but she and her friends had always appreciated how miraculous that one victory had been. There wasn't a non-Dalek time machine in history that had ever been confirmed as defeating more than one Dalek ship. Arachne joining the exclusive club of ships that scored that one kill had cemented in June's mind the fact that Arachne was the most powerful time machine that June was ever likely to meet in her life.

And now Captain June Harper's old name had returned from the oblivion of timelines that had once happened but then had never happened. From the oblivion that Arachne had erased it to.

How could it possibly have come back?

How could any time travelers possibly have found powerful enough technology to do something that Arachne could not overcome? Had they stolen from the Daleks? No, the Daleks would've been able to go back and stop the robbery from happening. Even having a Dalek time-changing time machine didn't help if the thief didn't already have the training to use the machine as well as a Dalek could, and how could a thief get the training unless somebody else had stolen a Dalek time machine first?

That didn't mean that the Daleks themselves were behind this, did it? Grading on a curve, June worked a hell of a lot harder to fight against the forces of darkness than most people did, but she'd never imagined that she'd made enough of a mark that the Daleks would take an interest in her specifically.

Did that mean that June's name coming back had been just a stupid accident? One of a thousand links in a chain of timeline changes stemming from something absurd like a Sontaran using time travel to cheat at some lottery? How could something like the name "Darico Cava" have possibly been recovered by complete accident?

June realized that she was kneeling with her hands on the floor. When had she lost her footing?

She forced herself to breathe. This wasn't something for her to worry about, this wasn't something that her brain was biologically capable of figuring out. Even if she could understand what had just happened, she would never be able to come up with any way to do anything about it. Only Arachne was able to understand how changing timelines truly worked, able to see where she was capable of changing something, where she was not, and if she was able to change something then how best to make the change happen.

Arachne's brain was a great many orders of magnitude more powerful than June's, and Arachne had clearly heard that name too. Whatever she was already doing to figure out if this was a problem – and if so, then how to solve it – June would just have to trust her greater expertise.

It wasn't like the name itself was a problem for June: if she got arrested, then she'd had a good run saving people on the outside, and now she could try controlling prison populations from the inside. Ending riots, saving captured guards, disrupting criminal communications between the inside world and the out, warning the guards about any flaws in the security that could be exploited… What had the greatest fictional hero in all of human history once said? "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in with me"? June could easily get used to living like that.

And if any of her friends got caught too and charged with helping her, then she could always find a way to cast herself as the psychopathic serial killer that law enforcement had branded her as being. She could make herself appear to be a threat for her friends to testify against in exchange for protection, and they could move on with their lives after reduced sentences while she got used to her new life.

No, her name itself wasn't the issue. The only problem June could think of was the technology required to get the name back in the first place and how that technology might influence the rest of the timeline, and that was something for Arachne to figure out, not June.

In any case, June didn't have time to worry about this even if she would've been able to. She had so many new friends to welcome into their new family, she should be focusing on them right now.

She looked over to Damien. "Need a hand?"

Damien's half-closed eyes snapped open. "Captain!" He climbed to his feet and saluted. "Yes, please. Would you mind?"

June laughed. Damien never would run out of sarcasm, would he? "I'm glad you're OK. Could you get everybody together while I come up with a good 'welcome aboard' for everyone?"

Damien nodded. "How much time do you need?"

"Not much, I'm hoping our new friends will want to talk too. I just need a good opening."

Damien walked to the ladder and started climbing. "Do you think we should ask if there's anything they've always wanted to do, somewhere they've always wanted to go? Or should we start with personal introductions?"

Good ideas. "Personal, definitely personal." June decided that she would ask if any of the new family members wanted to introduce themselves first. If none of them did, she'd ask if any of her old friends wanted to go first. If nobody else wanted to go first, June would do it herself.

Now she just needed something to start with if she ended up going first. Would it work best to talk about the years she spent in law enforcement before she'd been nicked for going off-book? Would it work best to talk about how she'd met her current circle of friends? Would it work best to talk about her more recent life and what she liked doing with her friends for recreation?

She decided to talk first about how she'd met Nathan and Ari a year and a half ago, then about how the three of them met Damien about half a year after that.

Damien and The Agent may have gotten surprisingly close in what little time they'd known each other, but looking at everybody else it had to feel like June and her three established friends were one tightly-knit group and the four that they'd rescued were a second equally-tight group. The four guests who would be joining the family had to feel like outsiders right now.

June decided to emphasise that she and Damien had felt the same way when they were each new to the family. Whatever else the former captives were going through that June's life could not possibly compare to, she could at least reassure them that they were not alone in how it felt to start a new life with a new family.

Granted, she and Damien had each joined the family one at a time, but she hoped that this basic concept would translate well enough to the different situation.

June took a breath, then jumped to the ladder that Damien had used. She grabbed onto a rung a few centimetres down from Ari's ceiling, jumped again up to the middle storey, and grabbed another rung to catch herself. She turned and stepped down from the ladder.

Everybody else was waiting. Damien, Nathan, and The Agent were standing against the storage compartment in the middle of Ari's floor, The Agent wrapped around Damien's arm and both clearly wishing they could be snogging right now. Kyra was sitting on the ladder to June's right. Shanjik and Kathryn were standing about half-way between Kyra and the boys.

Shanjik tilted his head. "Shan, do you need to rest, jik?"

June wanted to laugh. Why would she need to rest in the middle of something as wonderful as this? "No, I'm good." She prepared to start her story about meeting Nathan and Ari.

"Shan, are you sure? You smell like you're about to crash, jik."

Did he mean "crash" in that the drain of June's exertion over the course of the battle would catch up with her? How the feeling of pure-adrenaline would wear off and be replaced by the dizzying combination of extreme-adrenaline and simultaneous extreme-exhaustion? Sure, that was something that always happened after the most intense battles, and sure it was something that was going to happen at some point after this one, but that didn't mean that it was going to happen right now. That just meant that June should try to ride the adrenaline for as long as possible before it mated with the eventual exhaustion.

June started to tell him that she felt perfectly fine. Her entire face yawned before she could say anything.

Damn it. Why the hell had Shanjik had to say anything?

June looked around at the people who would be joining her family: the insect doctor and the Time Lord brother and sister standing on the floor, the psychic girl sitting off to the side.

What the hell had June been thinking? Just because she'd been excited to jump into the new family meeting didn't mean everybody else was. Maybe they needed time to relax and get used to their new home before jumping right into the extra stimulation of a massive meeting. "You know what everybody? Change of plans, I think our first stop should be the sleeping quarters upstairs. All of us are exhausted, some of us more than others, and anybody who wants to should feel free to just take a break for a few hours. We can try big group introductions after everybody's had a chance to unwind. Who here has seen the sleeping quarters?"

Damien raised his hand. June had to stop herself from laughing.

The Agent didn't stop himself. He laughed with an amazing smile on his face as he raised his hand. Kathryn and Shanjik raised theirs next.

June started to offer to show Kyra to the quarters. Then she remembered the whole reason she'd wanted group introductions in the first place: Damien and The Agent were the only pair from both groups who were completely comfortable with each other. "Kathryn, Shanjik, would either of you mind showing Kyra where everybody sleeps?"

Kyra raised her hand. "You and Shanjik are showing me right now." She nodded. "Thanks for showing me."

"Shan, you're welcome, jik."

June yawned again. "All right then. Anybody going to sleep before we try anything else?" She raised her hand.

So did Shanjik and Damien. Then Kyra. Then Nathan.

Kathryn and The Agent looked at each other. Kathryn turned to June. "We're probably not going to sleep for a while."

She sounded confidant, but so had June a moment ago. "Are you sure?"

"We don't have any kind of circadian rhythm like most species do. We could stay up for days if we wanted."

That was not something that June expected to hear, but that was impressive and she that wished she could do it too. On a normal day, she tried to keep her schedule as regular as possible – up at 0600 every day and asleep at 2200 – but there were so many days in June's life that didn't end up being normal. How amazing would it be for June to be able to _choose_ a standardised sleeping schedule anytime there wasn't any kind of emergency _and_ to be able to put sleep off indefinitely any time there was?

Still, June hadn't just been talking about physical exhaustion. "Does this also mean that sleep doesn't refresh you mentally the way it does for most people?"

Kathryn's pretty face puckered up as though she were about to snog someone. "Oh, OK I got it."

Damien yawned.

June yawned yet again. She turned back to the ladder. "Well I'm heading up now." She glanced over her shoulder on the off-chance that she could create another connection – or two – between each half of the new family. "Anybody care to join me?"

Damien jerked his face towards the rest of the group and mouthed "No! No! No!" shaking his head like he was ripping the flesh off of a freshly-killed meal.

June pinched the bridge of her nose. Why did he always have to be like that?

Still, she couldn't help but smile. It was so good to be back home with everybody she loved still in one piece.

June jumped through the ladder shaft up to the top storey. She didn't mind as she walked to Ari's sleeping quarters that she'd be sleeping alone again. She'd have appreciated the company, but not if nobody in her new family was interested in return. If they never showed an interest, then she would keep taking care of herself, and if it took a while before anybody showed an interest, then June would gladly wait however long it took for them to grow comfortable with her.

She didn't need to make anybody in her new family rush anything. They had all the time in the universe to decide what they wanted to do next.

 **The End.**

 **OK, not the end of my characters' life stories (except for Col. Leeson, Dr. Jacob, and all of the anonymous mooks that the** _ **Morningstar**_ **crew fought, may they rest in pieces), but the end of this specific installment. I have a few more stories planned in my head, but clearly I need to be prepared for it to take a longer time for me to write them than I'd thought.**

 **Joss Whedon was always brilliant at closing every season of every series with a climax that** _ **could**_ **serve as the grand finale if the network ever decided not to renew the show, but which could easily follow into another season if he ever did manage to stay on the air. I tried to do the same thing with the ending to this story, I hope that I did so even half as well as Joss Whedon always did, and** **I hope that everybody enjoyed reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it :) Please review!**


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